Slapped while Sleeping
28. November 2008Due to the fact that I often build quality sites because I know the work will pay out when I enter a certain niche I almost never get slapped by Google, if at all. In this example, I registered a domain around 2006. If I look at it today, it wouldn’t meet the Adwords Guidelines anymore. It would be a typical thin affiliate site.
However, back in the day it worked, and it didn’t receive a slap, ever .. Some months passed and suddenly the offer was canceled. There hadn’t been an alternative so I stopped the Adwords campaign and slowly forgot about the site.
Now we’re writing almost 2009 and I picked up that site again because I got a new offer which fits perfectly into that topic. So I started building a great landingpage, put up unique content like mad and transformed that thin affiliate site into an Adwords Beauty.
I checked through everything to be sure the content is fine and started creating the new Adwords Campaign. After I submitted I had instantly a quality score of 1 or 2 on all my keywords. I never had such a low quality score when I started a campaign, so I had been pretty surprised.
I created several AdGroups, optimized the Landingpage, the ads, everything.. but I didn’t pass the bad quality score, it was just sticking with me. I decided to wait 24h, no luck. The bid prices were totally normal, but the quality score didn’t get the campaign going.
So I moved everything to a new domain, set up a new Adwords Campaign and finally got the quality score I expected, a 9 of 10.
What does that tell us? Don’t think you’re save of slaps as soon as you stop a certain campaign. In this case I got slapped after I took my Adwords Campaign offline. If they find you, they slap you.
Too bad, the domain got at least a little bit of domain-age already. Maybe I can bust it out now, let’s see how long it takes.
Quality pays out, as long as you don’t expect the site to be a short-term-money-maker.