Did you get the dreaded Google Adwords slap last week? I did.

By slap I’m referring to having a good percentage of your Adwords keywords going inactive unless their minimum bids are raised from let’s say around .25 to well over $1 and sometimes even as high as $10, which is what i got whacked with. If you are trying to get low-cost clicks, good luck. If you are low margin, again, good luck. Basically, if you get slapped, good luck!

This isn’t the first time Google has hit me. They did it back in March, and I guess they felt the need to weed, so they fired-up the Slap Engine again last week.

For me, honestly, I don’t have a real big problem with it. I think the Slap hits those sites that are paper-thin affiliate sites, and that’s mine. If you have a real, well-developed, user-oriented site then I feel sorry you. But I’d imagine the majority of those sites hit are small, low-content, go-between-type affiliate sites.

In my case, just as I did in March, rather than spend weeks trying to overcome the outrageous minimum bids I’ll probably just pack up the carnival and move the whole shebang to new domain. It’s easy, it’s fast and guess what? Perhaps some of my competition was also hit so I’ll have a quick leg-up on them.

If your domain is too precious, then best bet is to blow up your site and start over. Fill it with original content, extra pages and make sure your ads are in tune with the landing page, that is same word usage, same theme, etc. As for me, I’m off to buy some new domains!

Related Posts on This Topic:
The Google Adwords Slap: $10 Minimum Bids Anyone?
Google Wants to Get to Know You
Yahoo Search Marketing UK Ad Quality Score System Update This Week
Creating a Google Sitemap, a Worthwhile Endeavor?
The Google Grace Period for New Websites

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 13th, 2008 at 4:30 pm and is filed under Adwords, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.