Adwords Quality Score Issues With Brand New Sites

By Author: Giotto De Filippi
Total Articles: 12
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This is an issue that I'm sure is having many people struggling with.

When you add an advert in Adwords, Google will send its Adwords bot to crawl your site and determine its quality score according to several factors (Time to load the page, presence of certain elements like privacy policy, terms and conditions, number of pages, presence of certain keywords on the pages, etc)

On that basis youll get a quality score number comprised between 1 and 10. The higher the quality score the lower youll have to pay for a click in a given spot. This is just a first quality score ...
... assessment based on the crawling of your site and the relevancy of the advert to the keyword.

After that Google will adjust your quality score also based on the CTR you are getting.

However if you get a very poor quality score (like 1) and they put your minimum bid at $5 or $10 its basically impossible to improve the CTR since you are not showing up at all so you dont get any impressions/clicks.

What I found is that the quality score algorithm Google uses is FAR from perfect, actually seems it has very serious flaws, which CAN be exploited by a savvy Adwords player.

So once you write your first advert ever for your brand new site you could just happen to get a very low quality score on the first crawl, and if this happens you may be in serious trouble, keep reading to understand why.

Please note that this is not just typical with sales letter sites, but it can actually happen on larger sites (even if for more developed sites there is another easier solution Ill describe later in this post).

What Google will tell you is that you should improve your quality score by making changes to the site. (Assuming that when you click on the details of the quality score it tells you that the landing page is not relevant, which is the hardest problem to solve).

In my experience this wont work at all, no matter what changes you make to your site your quality score wont improve.

I did a lot of research on this issue, and CONSISTENTLY get the following outcome:

If this is your first advert ever for your brand new site and you get a very poor quality score, basically that domain is trashed.

Means that no matter which changes you make to the landing page, or no matter if you create a new AdWords account, youll be given again a very poor quality score. What I then do is I register a new domain (after making changes to the site), I dont even bother to create a new AdGroup, I just go in the Ad Variations Tab, create an IDENTICAL Ad Variation except for the Destination URL, delete the previous advert with the punished domain and wait a few minutes. Your quality score will immediately be reassessed and if the corrections you made to your landing page are right you should get a good quality score. If not you have to keep trying with new domains.

The key thing to remember from this is that there is no point to make changes to the landing page if it got a very poor quality score in the first place. No matter what changes you do Google will remember that domain, even if you create a new Adwords account.

So what I do now is I never experiment the landing page with the real domain I want to use, I first experiment with some domains I register just for that purpose, and only when Im happy with the quality score I get I make a mirror copy of the site on my valuable domain, since I need to be 100% sure that the first Adwords bot crawl ever for a domain must lead to a good quality score.

Now how can those flaws be exploited? Very simple

While I was struggling with those issues, I decided to call the Adwords customer support and ask them to do a manual review of the site. They are aware that their algorithm has flaws (even if they dont admit it) so they offer this recourse, of manually reviewing the site.

However they will manually change your quality score only if they determine that your site deserves it, means that if its just a sales letter site, or its something odd like a miracle cure, a get-rich-quick site, etc., there is no way they are going to manually improve the quality score. They would probably do it if your site is a good portal, a quality online store with many products, etc. But if you have just a sales letter, or you have no much content you wont get the quality score changed.

However a well done sales letter can convert very well, so those who are able to master this will find themselves with much less competition, since all the amateur players will have poor quality score and only the professionals will be in the game.

So basically Google as per their policy says that a sales letter site SHOULD get a poor quality score, and thats what you get if you ask for manual review. However manual review happens if you ask for it, so its better not to ask, register several domains and experiment with your landing page until you get a good quality score, then mirror the site with your final domain, add it to the Ad Variations and remove the old domain. Remember that once a brand new domain gets a poor quality score its for good, so experiment first with worthless domains that you just registered!

In a future post Ill explain what are the things to try to improve the quality score of your landing page, so you know what to experiment with.


Giotto De Filippi is an expert consultant with both Adwords and SEO. He writes on his blog PPCHACKING.COM giving advanced tricks about how to get better results with Adwords. A lot of emphasis is put on the Quality Score technology Adwords uses. He has 10 years Internet Marketing experience and has worked both for very large corporate clients and small to medium business - consistently achieving noticeable improvements for his customers.