Does Article Content Still Matter on Adwords?
Geordie Carswell on 03 May 2008
When the first Google quality slap went out in July 2006, affiliates quickly figured out that adding article content to their domain and linking to it via a “resources” link or similar at the bottom of their landing pages was seemingly what Google wanted.
The one constant with Quality Score since then however is that nothing is staying the same. So does packing in the article content still matter? Many advertisers say that they now rarely add anything more than a contact us and privacy policy link at bottom of their landing pages and manage to get along just fine QS-wise.
Here’s my take: When you’re first starting in a new niche with a brand new domain, yes, content matters. Obviously, Google is familiar with landing page best practices, and doesn’t expect their big agency advertisers’ clients to send their clicks to article pages only. Every big agency client or vendor advertiser (that Google is working so hard to attract) also has a core domain for their business with lots of content, most likely their corporate site or product catalogue. With that domain content as a solid foundation, Google lets the advertiser send their Adwords traffic to tightly focused landing pages.
My experience with affiliates has been similar…to a point. If the affiliate’s core domain has plenty of quality, on-topic articles, you’ll get enough leash from Google to be able to branch out in landing pages with very little other than sales copy and other conversion elements.
There is one danger for affiliates though: If you’re promoting the same product as 25 different affiliates and don’t have a unique look or style to your landing pages, you might not pass a manual review. When you think about it, yes Google has a ‘no-double serving’ policy, but lately that’s been getting enforced as more than just a way to keep the paid SERPs from being loaded with the ads from the same URL. It’s also been applied recently to swaths of affiliate pages that show up in the same paid SERPs that look too close to each other, such that the customer might feel that even though the domain names are technically different, they are ending up at the same landing page again and again as they click back and forth through the paid results.
Moral of the story is to always start out with a solid value-add content base on your affiliate domain, and then test the waters as to how much leash you have to use shorter, more tightly arranged landing pages.
Category: Landing Page Design & PPC Campaigns







