One of my successful campaigns has been hit by Google’s landing page quality scoring, although, to date, most seem unaffected.
There’s an opportunity here! What we all need to do is to learn exactly what Google wants to see in landing pages. I’m guessing that a 500-word article along with affiliate links and AdSense are not what Google considers to provide a good user experience. If you have a site that actually looks like it’s been constructed with care, as opposed to thrown together in a couple of hours, I think that’s more likely to attract a good quality score from Google.
The opportunity is as follows. Google is now serving less ads. The search volumes will not have been affected by this change. Therefore, there will be less competition for the ads. As long as you can present a good web site to Google, you should still be able to find cheap clicks, and they should be cheaper than before. There is an opportunity to rank well for phrases that had a great deal of competition in the past!
That’s the way I’m thinking about things at the moment. It’s worth hanging in there. It has been claimed that Google is trying to weed out the MFA (“Made For AdSense”) sites, and keeping the quality ones. Therefore, Google are trying to reward the people that pay more attention to their sites.
I’ve logged a support ticket for Google to tell me why it is the case that some of my pages have a low quality score, and I’ll pass on anything that I feel I can share. I’m half-expecting a canned response, so I’ll see what happens and report.
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
