Google Penalize Landing Pages with Expensive Keywords

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Google - Surely not?

I'll try not to turn this into a rant but Google really "annoyed" me the other day.
(I was going to say something a little stronger but I edited this at the last minute!)

I woke up to find that loads of ad campaigns had been switched off. These were campaigns that I've spent ages getting good click through rates and good signup rates with.

The problem? My landing page score dammit.

As you're probably aware, if you're in the business of getting business leads from your website and use Google to direct traffic to your website, then "name squeeze" pages are a great way to get contact details and build up your list.

It's simple enough - you put up an ad on Google, get some traffic and join them up to a newsletter or your special offer or whatever. Then you test 'n measure and optimise
your conversion rate.

Except that now, Google are penalizing landing pages like this because they think that these sites offer little value to the visitor and consequently they'll increase the minimum bid for a keyword to £5.00 or sometimes more.

Even if you offer a million pounds, it's still be perceived by their robot as low value.

Now Google already dominate the natural search market. Everyone dances to Google's tune. Fair enough I grudgingly accept as they run a good search engine.

However, I think it's high handed of them to dictate what is acceptable and what isn't to the advertisers paying their wages on the PAID searches though!

I'm not talking about porn or affiliate sites or Viagara after all.
There's loads of people that have great stuff to give away and they're being penalized.

If someone wants to offer downloads of a white paper all about health and safety for example, in return to build up their mailing list - that's up to them. They're paying for the traffic after all.

I know other people have other opinions about this. But they're not paying my bills, I am.

Anyway, no point in moaning. Just got to deal with it.
.
The quick way to get round it is this :

1) Add extra pages to the website - and put links down the bottom as well.
2) Add extra content to the web pages, with carefully chosen key phrases.
3) Add some SEO on the site to make it search engine 'friendly'.

Do this and your landing page score will increase and your keyword costs should come back down again.(You might have to use a different URL initially to force Google to re-evaluate your site)

The bad news is that your conversion rate may well suffer as a result of these changes
because simple name squeeze pages with no frills can have a very high conversion rate which is often hard to beat.

So, you'll have to get inventive...

If you'd like more information about boosting your landing page score or if you've been
railroaded by Google's policy and have very high minimum bids, try joining my club...

Just go to http://www.mklink.com/freetrial/ today and register for a month's trial!


'till next time,

Mike Knight. MKLINK Internet Marketing Tips