AdWords - Google has become too powerful God?

First, a quote.

"And remember, where there is a concentration of power in few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control history has shown that all power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely ..". -John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, first Baron Acton, KCVO, DL (10 January 1834 - June 19, 1902)

Over the years, Google has steadily strengthened its guidelines on advertising, especially for the better. It used to be that anyone could make a competitive offer on keywords and put an ad on AdWords, even if the keywords you're bidding on were irrelevant to their ad. Also, gone are the days when an advertiser may pay their way out of the $ 5 or $ 10 "Google slap" for an announcement of poor quality.

In 2009, one of the improvements added to the Google AdWords interface, their review is a numeric quality score of 10 points for each keyword in an ad group. The higher the score, the more consistent the keyword is the content of the ad and landing page. But like all things Google, advertisers are still in the dark about what constitutes any particular score. Google provides general guidance on how to write a good ad and how they relate to a landing page, but there is no list of elements that guarantees a perfect 10. As an advertiser can improve their quality scores without knowing what needs to change?

I've been using AdWords since 2003. For about 1-1/2 years I was using exclusively a product to promote fitness. My whole site was related to the product a single trader.

For Coveted Position and CPC

I did not bid on the brand name of the merchant, as many traders, that forbids it. Rather, I offer a handful of large terms of fitness, yet closely related. I have maintained good positioning in the "sweet spot" is around 4 th place on the first page, with the costs of the ads a few cents per click. My ads were always profitable, and when Google introduced the numerical system of scoring, I have maintained a quality score of 7/10 range.

In the summer of 2009 I edited an ad, just as I had done countless times over the years. The next morning I noticed that my campaign had no impressions. I dug in keywords and saw that Google had given their quality scores between 0 and refused to see the ads, but nothing on my site or keywords were changed and the change I made to the announcement was insignificant . How do I switch from positioning and preferential prices for 1-1/2 years and then in the blink of an eye to lose everything?

Google burns its Bridges

The closest I can tell, the change has triggered a quality audit. After weeks of controversy with the AdWords team and answered e-mail in box, has come down to one thing. Google considered my landing page a "bridge page" and the content of my site's "poor" because my content was not unique enough for them.

Google wants to create a good advertising experience for its customers, eliminating what he believes, replies the merchant's site. In other words, they think that a buyer rather / would rather (in their view) only sees the merchant's site and not the site of an affiliate to promote products of the merchant.

One of my main arguments was that my clients do not know the product by its label. Instead, they were searching for a solution to satisfy a need for fitness. This is the only reason to choose the keywords that I did. My story sales were solid proof that I was dead on target with them.

My site converts visitors into paying customers. I received e-mails from the affiliate manager and the owner of the company tells me that I was doing a great job and keep it. I was also honored with an exclusive coupon code. I forwarded them to the team AdWords in my defense, but still refused to re-approve my ads.

Google offers advice, even though it might not work ... which has not

Google provided some recommendations to get back my old glory. One caveat, however, have warned that even if I did what you suggested, my country will never recover. That turned out to be true. I spent the whole dog and pony show and nothing I have done to the site from then on could pull out of the abyss. Even the new pages that I built following all their guidelines achieved a quality score of 0. It was obvious that they were not the rating of single landing page of my ad. Instead, they were looking at the entire domain and my domain now seemed to be black balled.

1) Google does not like affiliate pages. Consider them to fill pages with the merchant. So, I say. There are times when more experienced affiliates can make a sales pitch more than the merchant's site, can make a better visual presentation, or give evidence of personal experience after using the product. Or, I'll point out once again, a customer can not know the brand of a product, then try to generic terms that describe what a product does or who hope to receive benefits from a product.

2) Google does not like affiliates to promote a single product on their site. And 'their position that these sites replicate the merchant's site. Google told me that I had to add products to my site that the merchant does not sell, in order to make my site unique from that of the merchant.

I do not like creating pages like this one, because they take the spotlight off of my product functionality and send my visitors to shop on another site. People get distracted while you surf and if you do not return, this is a lost sale. I have a job as an affiliate and that is for the promotion of products to the trader at the best of my ability, do not send them to the site of another trader.

In some cases, a trader may not be as its products compared to those of another because their own products may be more expensive. Consumers do not always look at the quality, they want a deal. A year ago I struck a deal with a web hosting company to get lower prices on their plans for my clients. However, I was not allowed to advertise their company in any kind of comparative terms, as many web hosting affiliates to do, because even at a lower price, were still two or three times more than other companies.

I'm not totally against all of Google's advertising guidelines. I agree with them that the ads should not mislead, a landing page must deliver what the advertising says it will and a visitor should not have to opt-in to a mailing list to get the information promised ' ad.

The monopoly of Google

But the god Google has taken the "gangster mentality" that Baron Dalberg-Acton reference. Google AdWords has monopolized excluding single-merchant affiliates, but by allowing merchants to the original product to be advertised. It pushes down the competition by allowing the original traders to corner the market on PPC. Should Google be allowed to say that their advertisers affiliate sites must not contain any products sold on the merchant's site in order to participate in AdWords? And 'an immoral, unfair trade practice.

The survival of a merchant many times depends on the sales generated by affiliates. Denying affiliates to compete in the bidding process with a single keyword-commercial web sites, Google is stifling sales force of thousands of businesses and turning off the cash flow to affiliates that, in the past, and like me, successfully used AdWords. I immediately stopped making sales of the day Google gave me a slap.

Yes, affiliates can use other PPC services, but none of them have the coverage that is AdWords.

Yes, affiliates can use search engine marketing to promote any product in any way, but not everyone has the skill set and tenacity to do it. Fortunately, in about three months time I managed to recover about 85% of my pre-Google slap using SEM, but it is hard, never stops working.

You see, the beauty of PPC advertising is that it is "instant-on". No need to spend weeks or months trying to achieve top ranking in the SERPs, something that is impossible for highly competitive niches.

In my opinion, no white-hat publicity should be denied running a PPC campaign honest because they have chosen to only sell products from a single merchant on their site. The tender process should be among the advertisers, not Google.

Since 2003, I spent more than $ 16,000 on AdWords. This is a grain of sand on the beach of Google, but I can assure you, I will spend another $ 16,000 with them. Not when Google became a criminal gang, killing affiliate marketing, one by one .......