Google's penalty on poor landing page

Google has the policy to penalize keywords with low quality score by raising minimum CPC bid price as much as 10 times the average keyword bid price. According to Google, quality score is combination of clickthrough rate, ad text relevance, keyword performance and landing page quality and it suppose to encourage relevant ads for users. However, this policy can put Google advertisers left in the dark since they are not informed of how to improve the score or how long it take to recover from the penalty.

Our experience with this policy is horrible. We have serviced a pay per click client who was penalized for poor landing page quality. Before the penalty, the client’s average keyword price was around $1.00. After the penalty, minimum keyword bid price became $10.0. We contacted Google for advice first and were advised to figure out for ourselves. At this time, we were not informed why Google penalized the site. Thus, we did internal investigation and concluded it would have been a landing page while it was not obvious from non-professionals. Thus, we advised the client to improve the website usability with specific instructions. It is a risk for us, since the customer can blame us for giving inaccurate instructions if they do not get the client off from the penalty listing.

After a month, the customer came back with improvement based on our instructions. I called Google again, requesting a review on updated webpage. However, what I was told was disappointing. According to Google support team, it may take a month or much longer for the site to be reviewed and they cannot tell how long it takes. Until that time, minimum keyword price for keyword targeted campaign would remain at $10.0. Now, I have no choice but to advise my client to not depend on advertising on Google Adwords for a while, since I cannot predict when the review will happen.

From this experience, we all need to learn something. Advertisers need to realize high quality website is essential to keep Google Adword advertising economical. Agents and resellers have to be more diligent in recommending landing page improvement. Google also needs to improve their system in educating specifics of penalized items and reviewing penalized site with a predictable schedule. If businesses cannot rely on Google’s advertising, it would be a big negative to Google’s long term future.