Adult Affiliate Guide

A slap is not usually a pleasant thing and particular when it hits your PPC campaign in the form of a “Google Slap”. It's a phrase that is often misunderstood to refer to any perceived punishment from the major search engine including a drop in the rankings or being de-indexed, but it only has to do with your AdWords campaign.

A Google Slap is when your ad and associated landing pages are determined to be of such poor quality (known as the Google Quality Score) that Google will endeavor to remove your ad from the paid listings by lowering its position and raising the bid price so your campaign is no longer economical.

There are stories (both real and urban legend) of websites that have never recovered from a Google Slap. In fact, common practice seems to be abandon the domain that has been slapped and start again.

So by now you know enough to know that you want do everything you can to avoid the Slap. But how? Here's 6 tried and tested techniques to keep you from getting slapped by the long arm of the Google AdWords team.

1 – Have a multiple page website – Linking your ad to a single page site just won't cut it anymore. It doesn't matter how relevant that one page is, if it's not part of a larger, more established site then Google doesn't see your site as being helpful to the visitor. Ideally, your site should contain at least 10-15 pages of unique quality content, plus a Privacy Policy and About Us/Contact Us pages.

2 – Link to other pages on your site – When a visitor clicks through to your landing page you don't want them distracted to click through to other pages on your site. You want them to focus on your sales message. This means you might want to remove that menu sidebar for your landing pages. At the same time it's important you do have links to other parts of your site somewhere on your page, perhaps at the bottom of the page.

A new website is like a newborn baby. And no, I’m not referring to feeling like you went through labor pains to build it!

A newborn is fresh into the world and relatively unknown except to its proud parents, although not for long. New parents typically spend the next few days broadcasting news of the baby's arrival to family, friends, and basically anyone else who'll make the mistake of feigning interest. The baby's network grows and extends, going from unknown to well-connected in no time.

In a similar way, your new site enters the world wide web (of approximately 2 million websites and counting) and the only person who knows about it is you. Obviously you want to remedy that situation - fast.

So just like a proud new parent, you need to go about getting the news out that your website has arrived. Here are our top five ways to broadcast your baby website and start building its network asap.

#1 – Links from established websites

When you have CNN reporting news of your baby's birth to the world, everyone knows about it in record quick time. Matt Cutts, arguably Google's most well-known engineer, confirmed that getting a backlink to your site from a high profile website is the fastest way to get your page indexed, adding that indexing can be done in fractions of a second.

So if you can arrange to get your site linked to from a well-known site with a good PageRank, then that's the best method of getting your site linked quickly. Some ways to get backlinks from authority sites include:

* Write and submit a press release to www.prnewswire.com about your new site
* Submit articles containing backlinks to your site to Ezinearticles, Wetpaint, HubPages and Squidoo
* Add linkbait articles to your site for adding to social bookmarking sites like Digg or Delicious

#2 – Submit your site to Google

"Hello and welcome to Best Buy, would you like to see our selection of pineapples?"

Would you ever expect to walk into an electronics store only to have them offer you a great deal on fruit?

How about going to the local gas station to find them offering you the best designer fashion? (Exxon Versace?) Sounds absurd right? Of course it does! But it's no less absurd if you do it online!

I am officially sick to death of irrelevant advertisements on websites. If I go to a site that is about learning to play guitar - on what planet is the webmaster on to think that I, at this moment, am looking for new apps for my (nonexistent I might add with only a slight hint of resentment) iPhone?

Not only am I incredibly unlikely to click on this ad, but the entire user-experience of the website has been ruined.

At Affilorama, we often talk about creating niche websites. What is a niche? A niche is a small subset of the market that is interested in one very specific thing. It might be a certain problem that needs solving, or a specific need that needs satisfying.

Relevance could not be more important in niche websites, because the person is likely to be there for one reason. If you have a website about curing acne - then what's the point in having anything on that website that isn't about curing acne? You can have as much information as you want about different subtopics of acne - prevention of acne, types of acne, causes of acne. You can even have topics that are related - dealing with other skin blemishes or marks, scars, etc. But an ad for "clean your computer's registry today!" - Not so much.

Now often when people are starting out in online marketing, they are so focused on making money any way they can with their website that they try to cram as many different monetization methods into the site as possible. Unfortunately, this often leads to completely irrelevant ads and pages on an otherwise good site.

It’s ironic that with so much written about duplicate content, we are beginning to see these articles running into the exact issue they discuss! Obviously, we don’t want to contribute to that. But what we do want to do is provide a simple overview of exactly what duplicate content is and how you can prevent it from reducing your chances of ranking well in your chosen niche.

Why is duplicate content an issue?

The duplicate content issue began as a rumor a few years ago when Google search results would state that certain results were omitted because they were very similar to results already shown. Some webmasters deducted from this that Google was applying a ‘duplicate content penalty’ to these results, and started to spread fear and panic amongst site owners everywhere, fearful that their site might become the next to get hit with this ‘penalty’.

Google, in their wisdom, decided to address these concerns with the following statement:

* The duplicate content penalty does not exist.
* Google attempts to offer users diverse search results, so removing duplicate content is more about providing the user with a quality experience rather than penalizing the site owner.
* Sites that intentionally try to manipulate their rankings by scraping (copying) content from other sites are generally viewed as spam and removed from the results.
* Duplicate content in many cases conflicts with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines that recommend site owners provide content that is unique and gives value to visitors.
* Duplicate content is often a result of content management systems that can create multiple URLs to the same content.
* Duplicate content can dilute backlinks to these pages.
* Duplicate content can result in new pages on your site taking longer to be indexed.

This makes it pretty clear why it’s important for you to not only be aware of duplicate content but also understand exactly what it is.

What it is: Top content is normally determined by pages with the highest number of views. In addition to number of views, look for a low bounce rate and high number of referrals from other sites. Monetizing these pages involves thinking about ways to get the highest dollar return from visitors.

Far too often, high-traffic web pages go un-monetized. It might be a viral video on YouTube or some exclusive Miley Cyrus snaps, and all of a sudden it’s getting a huge number of hits. But there’s no advertising or sales messages on the page and you realize the webmaster either doesn’t know how to monetize a page or wasn’t expecting a sudden rush of traffic.

Monetizing your top pages will require some forethought. What sort of visitors are you getting to this page? What are their interests? What product or service are they best suited to? By considering these questions you'll be in a better position to match the right sales message to your audience and improve your conversion ratio.

What sort of sales messages might you display? An easy option is AdSense. It can be added to a page in two minutes flat, but it might not be the best way to monetize the page. Think of suitable ClickBank products you could advertise, or even products or review pages, which often have a higher return.

Action point: Identify your top content pages by page views and consider how you could convert visitors into dollars, or monetize using advertising or affiliate links.