Comments on: Quality score – what you can not control

By: Niche Affiliate Marketing

Niche Affiliate Marketing — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 14:24:26 +0000

I’ve to agree with Matt. If it was the case that Google penalized every affiliate landing page or site, then a lot of us wouldn’t be in this business.

By: Matt L

Matt L — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 01:42:42 +0000

I’m still failing to see why g would penalize sites that are obvious affiliates if they want a “better web”. Sure, lame landing pages whose only goal is a click to the offer page doesn’t add much to their goal for users but in many cases, affiliates are the ONLY ones adding value to the equation – the merchant themselves are too busy running the business and they in essence, farm out all the creative positioning of the product to the affiliates.

Hope they’re taking that into consideration (that affiliate doesn’t = evil). In my cases, everything has been cool but it’s hard to tell sometimes whether I’m lucky or trusted by “the machine”.

By: CPA Affiliates

CPA Affiliates — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 00:58:32 +0000

Yes googles hidden factors make advertising very difficult… I am wondering if at some point the FTC will jump and say it is trating some customers unfair etc… Not sure they ever would but i know G has been getting a lot of bad press for how they rate advertisers charge them more for “no apparent reason” etc..

Plus you left off the human factor of when they manually check you site.

By: sipboy

sipboy — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 21:28:01 +0000

@Dave
Could you give some names of the niches your talking about. I would like to research them. If not, I understand that too.

By: Chad

Chad — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 19:11:36 +0000

The way I understand it: say there are 10 advertisers for a certain keyword, and all have poor QS on their accounts and high bids. There is a good probability when you use that keyword you will be doing the same thing, which they factor into YOUR score.

By: Vlad

Vlad — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 19:07:02 +0000

talking about the business model, don’t you think that’s a little exaggerated. 70% of the sites have no business model(beside advertising) – so only service providers and ecommerce sites should be advertised through adwords?

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 19:06:54 +0000

Ehh, I just read my comment again and I suppose the way I wrote it makes it sounds like those sites could be mine… To be completely honest with you, no — I wish! (on my way, but not quite at that level yet

Somewhat related to your post is the one on Geordie’s blog from a few days ago (covering the recent NYTimes story on “ad quality”)..Highly recommend you and everyone else check it out. It also spurred me to read some archived interviews online with Nick Fox and company… between these interviews, Geordie’s explanation, and this post here, I think I’ve learned a bit more about QS this past week than I knew before.

Time to keep learning…

- Dave

By: Chad

Chad — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 17:55:18 +0000

Would those “number of sites in a few different niches” be yours?

Everyone I have talked to completely denies that past spend influences QS, but I wouldn’t be surprised if its factored in.