How to Beat the Google Slap with 5 Simple Steps…

Google Say What? So there I was, bidding on a keyword that was marginally related to one of my businesses. It was one of those "diamonds in the rough" that everyone talks about. It was converting like a madman. It was cheap. And best of all, it was a shorttail (one word) phrase match keyword! I kid you not, I was getting more leads per day from this single keyword than the rest of my keywords combined (about 2000 in total). The rest of my business systems were working like clockwork. Life was good.

That’s when it happened…

Google came around and made sure I knew who was boss. "No bidding on semi-irrelevant keywords for you, sir," THEY said, as they proceeded to cut my business by 20% by bumping up my minimum bids on that keyword and the others in the associated campaign to $10 and $5, but mostly $10. I need that keyword. It’s making me fat and happy.

Ohh the agony!

I had heard the stories and read the gossip, but it never happened to me before. So, instead of going on a forum and whining about it, I fixed it. My PPC bid manager and I sat down and tested about 15 different things. No gossip or rumors allowed, here is exactly how we broke out of jail with the worst possible quality score (QS) ($10 min bid) and started advertising on that keyword again with a GREAT quality score and min bid of $0.04 and $0.05 again, and how you can too:

Regroup your keywords into tight adgroups. Start off with one keyword per adgroup.

Yes, Google is telling you how to structure your campaign, and it is a huge pain to create such small adgroups. However, through testing, we found that Google will penalize you for:
- Having too many keywords in the adgroup. I had about 50 keywords in one adgroup, all related, but a lot of super longtail searches. Yes, this rumor has been confirmed by me. We took the same keywords and put it in a different adgroup, but all alone. This alone lowered my bid to $1 from $10.
- Having too many unrelated keywords in one adgroup. Just don’t do it. This actually wasn’t an issue for my account, but I tried an experiment a few months ago and found that they penalize you for it (the group only had 4 keywords, but they were very different from each other).
Build a site and link to the rest of your site from your landing page. Possibly include links to relevant external pages.

This had the second biggest impact on my QS. While the site did have actual pages, they were not linked to from the landing page. Good converting pages give the visitor two options: the option you want them to take (in this case opting in), or the back button. No links to external pages, or else you will lose visitors to those links.

Well, I guess Google thinks this provides a "bad user experience", which it probably does, but I’m not in the business of user experience. I’m in the business of making money. I put a few links at the footer to my sitemap and the QS went up. I then added a link to the #1 organic term for that keyword and the QS went WAY up. I only recommend you do that if you need to have a GREAT QS to compete. If a visitor clicks on that link, there is no way they’re coming back to your site.
Put the keyword in the meta tags and title tag. Possibly think about adding your keyword to the landing page ad copy, but that didn’t have as much of an effect.

Yes, yes, I know. This is simple SEO. However, through testing, I found a better converting title tag. Unfortunately the adwords bot thought the great converting title tage made the page irrelevant to the search that was being conducted. Once again, what is good for Google was not good for sales. Such is life.
Create a silo for your page.

This is a little more advanced, and not completely necessary for everyone, but this is how we got all the way down to $0.04 min bids. It’s not hard to create articles and they don’t even have to be unique. Steal some articles from an article directory focused around your keyword and link all of them to your landing page. Once again, a little SEO, and not always necessary, but it requires very little effort and may have great payoffs, especially if the other people in your niche know nothing about it.
If all else fails, create a new campaign and if necessary use a new domain.

I know this may not be an option for everyone, but this was actually what happened to me. My site was hand reviewed and hand penalized. We did everything above and only got the min bid down to $5 (POOR QS). I was afraid that my entire account was banned, but I looked at some of the other businesses I own and they were unaffected. I was very relieved

I created a new campaign with all of the above in place and the bid stayed at $5. My other keywords in other adgroups were unaffected. This led me to believe they penalized the keyword or the domain. Here’s the kicker: I started a new domain and loaded the exact same content onto it, and boom: $0.05 minimum bid and GREAT QS (I added the external link and siloing and got it to $0.04). We won!

It has been long enough for me to honestly say that the hand edit will not be coming back. What I think may have happened is that my site triggered an alarm/audit since the adwords bot could not see the rest of my site from my landing page. Then the human reviewer came around and said "Hey, this isn’t relevant!", either that or they just were in a bad mood because they hadn’t received their daily massage yet. Silly Googlers. Sometimes I wonder…

So here she is after the first day out of jail. One of the keywords listed above (note the very high CTR and high original bid. That’s for another post ) As said before, we went down to $0.04 min bid after that by siloing, and in this niche I’m competing in, every little bit counts.

That’s it! If you do these actions, I can absolutely guarantee you’ll be unslapped, even if temporarily. There is always the human reviewer factor, but the unslapping will get you up and started again and at least give you another fair shake with another reviewer.

If your account is banned, well, I’m not sure I nor anyone can help you. I’m also not sure Google can/will help you. I’ve experienced their ~~Customer Service~~ (stricken to avoid confusion where some people may think they have a customer service department).

Hope this helps. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.

Just so you can get an appreciation for them, my friend that works at Google gave me a training video for their Adwords developers: