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Pick a number between 6 and 950 and you’ll likely find evidence, or at least the antecedent number, for a Google ranking penalty. Webmasters and SEOers are in general agreement Google penalizes, and have dubbed them according to their numeric reprimand: -6, -30, -60, -950, and so on. Google inadvertently in cases has acknowledged such penalties exist, but has yet to present any hard and fast rules.

Maybe it’s getting to be time they do so. The days of one reverse-deciphering the algorithm seem long gone – the best at Yahoo and MSN don’t seem to have done it in all this time – as are the days when Google could be easily gamed with mere keywords and links. At this point, what’s the harm in letting webmasters know exactly why their sites incur penalties, giving them ways to atone, and taking away their wild speculations?

Then again, what would they blog about?

Google is in an enviable position. First, they don’t have to tell webmasters squat as long as they’re clamoring and clawing each other just to get listed there. Secondly, Google only loses if searchers take off, not search engine optimizers. But it seems they could eliminate some headaches by being more forthcoming about how not to incur the rankings wrath.

Not that they don’t fire warning shots. Last fall, much like how the Boston Massacre was conducted, Google felled a few as a warning to others to abandon the hope of paid link schemes. The speculation about minus-whatever penalties suggest the gradual increase in ranking penalties are similar warnings.

The leading theory is that these penalties are enacted by humans, not algorithms. If so, Google should think about being more forthcoming about their reasoning. We know that penalties are not exclusively enforced by humans. Last December a glitch in the system caused many to see their rankings drop by six places. Google acknowledged the –6 penalty as an error.

Recently the –60 penalty has been the focus, not just because the number of webmasters reporting drops in that range, but also because Googlers sort of back-alley nodding the penalty in certain forums.

In a Google Groups thread, Swiss Googler John Mueller replies to the pining post of one who took a –60 penalty. While this penalty and others had been explained away by webmasters as having to do with bad linking practices, this one had more to do with the template used, and the hidden content/links popping up in the code.

I’m still seeing templates being distributed with them; not only that, the links are disguised in a way that the average webmaster cannot find them.Personally, I think having footer links are fine if they are relevant to the site or template and nofollow’ed. However, hiding them in this style is - in my opinion - not ok at all. Just this week I helped a friend with his template: it had a block of code similar to this in it. It turned out that not only was it hiding links, it was also spreading malware. It really upsets me to find code like this in a template: it shows that whoever made the template not only knew the contents were not ok, but also wanted to prevent the user from finding or editing it.

We learn a few things from that statement: 1.) Be careful with your templates; 2.) Footer links should be nofollow links; 3.) There is a bit of manual interpretation when it comes to ranking. Barry Schwartz says it also means Google admits a –60 penalty exists.

Mueller suggested the webmaster clean up the code and submit a reconsideration request. Others suggested, under their breaths, that Google stop dictating every last detail of their sites.

A –30 speculator mentioned the use of a similar footer as well as buying some links, which he doesn’t think helped. Another, who got hit with a 950 rank-busting, declares no black hat tactics while admitting non-perfection. It could be that a –950 penalty is the last warning shot before getting booted from the index altogether.

One explanation for getting the –950 penalty was the use of interlinked sites with content that was “too thin” or irrelevant. That has a simple solution, really, and an old one: provide great, valuable content and only link to sites or pages that do the same.

Until we get more clear-cut do’s and don’ts and explanations of penalties, we’ll be free to speculate. If that never happens, here’s what we know:

1.    Nofollow links that could be construed as spammy or are bought and sold
2.    Be careful with templates, and pay close attention to footers to make sure there’s nothing shady there like hidden content or links
3.    Content is still the most important thing
4.    Pay attention to the warning shots

Article By Jason Lee Miller

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Very very good article for people that use ads. well worth the read!

Tomorrow I’m giving a talk at the eMetrics summit in San Francisco. A search marketing perspective can often seem “refreshing” in the context of the discipline of marketing in general; it even seems to go against the grain a bit. I’ll be telling the eMetrics audience a bit about how I use core stats in paid search to iterate much more rapidly than most analysts are used to. In other words, I won’t be talking about the fancy stuff you get from analytics reports, but the bread-and-butter stuff, like CTR and even initial Quality Scores (yes, that’s a statistic!).

The majority of data analysts look for patterns after the fact, gathering information from large volume corporate campaigns and developing strategies in response to research. While the hunger for more rapid iteration is starting to trickle into many larger companies’ web strategies, the lightning-iterative environment of paid search seems hectic and loosey-goosey by comparison. We are the proverbial street-smart Fat Tony (or Joey Metallica) by contrast with straight-laced Banker John who believes in data almost to a fault.

In the SEM field, a debate continues as to how much automation we should be using, and how much human interpretation is necessary. It’s an important debate, because with all of that rapid iteration, the majority of human analysts are far worse performers than computers. But not all are. And computers are still notoriously poor at theory-building and inferences in complex environments… at least the computers that use the pea-shooter algorithms developed by lone developers or small teams at small software companies.

Recall that Google actually has amazing computing power and highly intelligent algorithms. In that environment a human analyst can leverage Google’s power, for free, and do very well.

In that environment, we know that new campaigns are under the gun, facing a potential cold shoulder from Google’s quality score algorithm. You must be relevant from the start, gain high CTR’s on your ads (all else being equal) in the early going, or face higher costs and even a spiral of failure.

Three classic techniques can get you to better ad copy more quickly, without brute force testing of many variations. By “better,” I mean higher CTR. We’ll need to make Google happy in the early going to build up quality signals that will give you an account-wide benefit. Later, you can drill down more carefully on ROI related measures.

Dynamic keyword insertion in title. The first technique is fairly simple. Unless you know better from the beginning, try dynamic keyword insertion in title, but still try to pay attention to decent alternate text in cases where the matching won’t work. Yes, I generally warn clients not to overuse dynamic keyword insertion because it ups CTR’s too much without an ROI benefit in many cases. But to start, it’s helpful to have it in your arsenal. The basic theory is we don’t know what people are thinking yet, but we do know they’ll click on a title that matches their query.

So, for a product offering archived, remastered football coverage (hypothetical example), you would use:

{KeyWord:Football Classics in HD}

If someone types in “packers videos,” the title would say “Packers Videos.” At least you haven’t hurt your chances.

For body copy, plain and navigational beats flair and color most times. Ad text that says “Does Sterling Sharpe look better in HD?” will fail (even if the query was about Sterling Sharpe) compared with clear text that says something like “Free trial offer - classic NFL game archive in HD. Experience it now!” The latter explains the offer, doesn’t try to be clever, and contains a call to action. (Actually, twice, because mentioning a free trial is a quiet call to action.)

Use “skinny persona research” to govern your early ad copy choices. Or if that’s even too much research - just do less of it, or … none at all, until you stop making ridiculous mistakes due to flawed research. Fat Tony doesn’t have time for the in-depth research conducted by Banker John. But what he can do is use his head, and pay attention to ‘lite’ stats about his business all the time, as they emerge. An inexperienced attempt to relate to video gamers, for example, might try overly hard to relate to the “vernacular” of youth: a challenging and often unrewarding effort in the paid ads space. A ham-fisted attempt to squeeze demographic assumptions (or “research”) into the tiny ad space might take the assumption that a certain game is targeted only to youth, primarily to Asian youth, or (let’s say a video hockey game) primarily to male white kids who predominantly grew up in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.

It’s definitely important to think about personas in writing your ads, and these might change from ad group to ad group. But the key is not to let persona thoughts override winning ad tone and tried-and-true navigational and psychological triggers. And when so many would-be creative writers actually insert wrong personas into ads, the maxim “less is more” applies in most cases to the targeting effort. Use a light touch here.

You can’t ignore what the market may be looking for, but don’t make a mess of the targeting process. For video gaming in general, your first thought might be “suburban kids.” Your second thought might be, though - not only kids. Fat Tony knows that the average age of gamers is over 30. So, your market is basically gamers, and anything that might entail. The same thought process goes for “niche” games and content. People of all ethnic groups, believe it or not, like hockey. Nearly 50% of football fans are women. Do football fans live in the city or country? Both. White kids like Eminem, and they also like 50 Cent. “Niche” video games find a broad market, and even if you could identify the niche audience, would you speak to them differently? Generally, only if they speak a different language. Do some people live in low income areas or areas that have lower broadband penetration? Sure, and you might someday finagle a way to incorporate that insight into the demographic targeting settings that govern your bidding, as long as you know for sure if those insights mean your targets will be more or less likely to buy your product as a result of their low-income, slow-DSL plight. But you ain’t gonna squeeze all of that insight into your brief text ads. So you probably shouldn’t try.

What we do know is that 100% of the people looking at your ad are searchers. Most searchers dislike ads that seem to be laser-targeted to someone else. At the other end of the spectrum, most searchers dislike ads that are overly generic. Many searchers will recoil at ads that seem to be written in “ad agency” style with overly stylized “tagline” feel. Searchers who are misled and feel duped once they arrive at a landing page will stab at the back button, making your trickery penny wise and pound foolish as quality score algorithms punish you with high minimum bids.

Possibly the most important thing to do in your early ad tests, then, is not to trip over your own shoelaces trying to be too clever. Your plan needs to be built around the granularity of your prospects, the psychological triggers common to many searchers and customers, and avoiding mistakes that turn searchers off. That sounds funny to say when, depending on the query, upwards of 98% of people won’t click on your ad. But within your 1-2% sub-sliver of ad clickers, all else being equal, you should focus on developing consistent techniques to reach the 2% or 3% level faster as opposed to languishing at 0.5%. (In some niches of course you will reach 8-10%. I am talking about the high volume stuff, mainly.)

You’ve only got 25-35-35 characters, and display URL to work with here. Even so, writing these ads is a sensitive task and early success is vitally important to the economics of your campaign. Find a winning strategy inside of a month, and you are into the initial stages of refinement far ahead of competitors who take months to study their options.

Good luck.

P.S. Rapid iteration won’t work with low-volume campaigns. Because of that, it’s even more important to start well on lower-volume accounts, because it will be impossible to test your way to the best answer in any reasonable time frame if you start poorly.

Andrew Goodman is the founder and principal of Page Zero Media