Google Adwords

What causes Poor Landing Pages ?

There are numerous causes, and finding the root cause of the problem can be difficult to discover. Google never informs its advertisers of pending score changes that would result in ads not generating impressions, and they will almost never notify you of why the score has changed.

This is a problem for Google. Despite the enormous amount of help, advice, and information provided on their website, and due in large part to the fact the answers the automated help provides are very generic, Google is flooded with complaints that it cannot handle, which results in confused, impatient, upset, and even angry, customers.

Below is a list of probable causes, that may result in scoring your landing page as poor. They are in no particular order.

• Content.

  Lack of content, or indexable content.

• Dynamic Re-Directs.

  Your landing page URL re-directs to another URL. This is against policy. Google cannot link the content from a dynamically re-directed URL because it is unknown until a user clicks on the Adwords ad link.

• Malware.

  Your website contains Malware.

• Security.

  Your website has been hacked, re-directing to a website that contains content that is harmful.

• Google's list of website types that do not qualify.
• Terms of Use.

  Your website has violated Google terms of service.

• Missing.

  The content linked to your advertisement URL does not exist, resulting in a 404 error.

• Server Error.

  Your website, or linked URL, is unreachable, resulting in a server error.

• Configuration.

  Your website, or linked URL, is blocking Ads-Bot Google access, which is the Adwords System.

Affiliate Marketers Beware

There are so many websites that have capitalized on affiliate marketing, selling the products and services of other companies for commissions, and in the past, they have been able to use the Adwords system to increase their exposure.

Those days may be gone.

If you are an affiliate marketer, owning a website, and hoping to advertise it on Adwords, think again. Google has expanded its definition and policy, towards websites that offer too much in the way of advertising, and especially if that advertising involves affiliate marketing. If Google has not caught up with you yet, they soon will, and drop the poor landing page score on your domain.

The Adwords system is looking for original content providers to advertise on its network. Too often, in the past, Adwords has been populated with similar websites, all selling the same, or similar, product or service, which lead users of the network to lose confidence in it.

It had been far too easy for the criminal element to establish phony websites, advertise them on Adwords inexpensively, and profit from it, leaving Google in their wake with the complaints of fraud.

Unfortunately, legitimate and authoritative websites have been caught in the crossfire. For example, Amazon.com. The Adwords system no longer allows Amazon affiliates to advertise on their network. If you have links to amazon.com on any of your landing pages, you may soon be penalized.

What You Can Do If You're An Affiliate Marketer

Add as much unique content to your site as possible, making your site valuble, and offering visitors more than just a portal to other websites. Do not, under any circumstances, place your affiliate links directly on your landing page(s). Instead, insert the affiliate links 3 or 4 levels deep into your website, and mask the affiliate link to whatever extent you can.

For instance, let's say your landing page, is your home page. Offer unique content about products or services that you are providing on behalf of another website for commissions, like details about the products or services, customer reviews, pricing, the ability to leave feedback or ratings, and make sure your visitors are able to contact you in the event questions arise.

On those secondary, or deeper, pages, is where you would ideally place masked links to purchase these products and services. The masked link will be linking to a page on your website, and after a visitor clicks on those links, they will be re-directed to the affiliate website.

It's important to note, you should always inform visitors when you are providing a link to another website, via re-direction. This promotes an enviroment of trust for your visitors, and complies with an concern with transparency, so the visitor is fully aware. Ideally, offering some additional benefits or motivation to visitors, for visiting your affiliate link, can also provide additional, valuble, benefits too. It could be a discount, or a free item to be received, upon a successful sale.

Other Possible Causes

There are a multitute of unique problems the Adwords System can encounter, when crawling your website, causing poor landing page scores.

A somewhat common occurance, that has caused many to scratch their heads in disbelief over poor scores, has been the inability for certain hosting providers, such as godaddy.com, to properly configure server interaction with robot access.

Godaddy, like some other hosting providers, attempt to block what is believed to be invalid requests for data, from robots and crawlers. There are a number of websites that spoof user-agents, in order to mimic the results of a user-agent crawling the page, to provide their visitors a way to see what a user-agent sees when crawling a page.

What this action results in, is the actual blocking of the “real” user-agent, attempting to crawl a page. And, in the case of the Adwords System, if it cannot access the page, to generate a quality score, then no score will end up in a poor score.

Most robots will not crawl a meta-refreshed page, because of the way in which the page is accessed - not a web browser like Internet Explorer. A robot accesses a website page, strictly to index its contents, and not view, or display, the page. When a robot encounters the meta-refresh, it may, or may not, follow the meta-refresh link, leading to a new page.

302 Re-Direction vs 301 Re-Direction Method

Another possible reason for a landing page being rated as poor, can stem from the use of certain methods to re-direct older web pages to newer ones.

There have been cases, recently, of webmasters abusing the 302 re-direction method, specifically for use with Google. The 302 re-direct method informs search engines of a “temporary” move, of a web page or domain, to a new location. Depending upon how the instruction is setup, can determine how a crawler classifies the content it finds in either location - the older page or the new page.

Webmasters have been exploiting how Google classifies the 302 method, in which Google will apply the page rank of the new URL to the old one. How webmasters exploit, what is clearly a mistake by Google, is the way in which the 302 re-directed site changes its HTTP response code, depending on what the user-agent is, and the IP address. For instance, when the user-agent is the Google-Bot, the offending website changes its response code to 302 Temporary Location, as opposed to when the user-agent is, say Internet Explorer, the response code becomes 200 Okay, which accesses the site normally.

This deception impacts page rank significantly for the older URL, and can steal the page rank of the newer URL, which has the net affect of trading places in search results. This has allowed weaker, or scam, sites to steal the page rank of legitimate and popular websites, plummiting those sites to the bottom of results, while the weaker/scam site takes its place in the top position of search results.

Bing, Yahoo, and some other search engines, do not classify 302 re-directs in this way, but Google does, or did. Recently, it is believed Google has fixed, or developed a work-around, to prevent these black-hat seo tactics.

To avoid appearing as though your site is attempting something suspcious, a web page that requires re-direction, to another location, should require a “hard and fast” ( permanent ) server level instruction. This is the 301 re-direction instruction. The 301, unlike the 302, means a permanent move or relocation, which transfers the page rank between the two locations, and leaves the older location without rank.

It is highly recommend to use the 301 re-direction method, when using the Adwords system, to advertise your website and landing pages, in the event you need to provide a new location for your domain or pages.

For more detailed information, speculation, and theories on the root causes of poor landing page scores, refer to the articles listed below.