Drawing on the Web

Google has been working hard to make its Adwords program more effective for advertisers. First, it offered them a choice of whether to put their ads on search results, on related web pages, or both.

Advertisers also got the option (turned off by default) to bid different maximum amounts for clicks on search results than clicks on web sites.

Recently, Google put a couple more nails in the coffin of the “Adsense site.”

First, they’ve been working diligently to identify the sites that it doesn’t believe are appropriate for its search results — by examining both electronically and personal examination, especially sites with high-income key words. Another thing for which they are looking are sites that display different results to the search engines than they do to visitors.

When Google finds what it considers to be junk, that is, sites that are there for income generation rather than providing real information to visitors, Google has a tendency to de-index the site. It does the same thing with sites that use “black hat” techniques like displaying different results to search engines than real visitors. Google justs remove the site and all its pages from their indexes. And the site owner’s income plumets.

Recently, they applied a couple of slaps against Internet marketers of different types.

The most prominent of these, at least the one that has been mentioned the most, has been the use of Google’s evaluation of the ad’s landing page in order to set the minimum bids for the ads. This means that, if you submit an Adwords ad, Google will look at the target web page — and use it to decide what minimum you’ll have to pay to have it show in search results.

The second was related. If the target page was a squeeze page, the price skyrocketed. What’s a squeeze page? It’s one of the latest marketing techniques — you have to give your email address in order to get to the real content. Then, the marketer can use it for emails to you.

The change that has been almost ignored was another major hit to many of their Adwords customers. These customers paid for ads to send visitors to web sites that sold products.

In this case, these customers were “affiliate marketers” — that is, they would receive a commission on the sale, if one occurred. Google now requires that advertisers have their own landing page. Google prohibited the use of redirected URLs in Adwords advertising.

Before this step, you didn’t even have to have your own web site to make money with Google ads. Now, your ad has to feed the visitor to your landing page, and then you hope they’ll click on the link to go to the retail site. Of course, this was combined with the examination of the landing page for price purposes.

This last hit, this real hit against affiliate marketing, is a problem for both small adverrtisers and small businesses who exist through having affiliates pay to market their products. After all, the small businesses get free advertising (paid by the affiliates) and only have to pay a commission for actual sales.