Why Is Google AdWords Suspending Accounts?
There’s recently been some buzz about Google’s approach to suspending AdWords accounts that are sponsoring so-called “doorway” pages (a.k.a. “bridge” or “jump” pages), so it’s worth describing what these are – and what they are not.
The accusation goes that Google is suspending pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns that have pages linking to payment platforms or shopping carts hosted by third-party sites. The idea is that if you have a site promoting a product, it will be banned from any PPC campaign if the final payment is handled by PayPal, ClickBank or even Google Checkout. Obviously, if this were the case, the vast majority of e-commerce sites would be suspended from AdWords, so where does the confusion arise?
Google’s View of Doorway Pages
Doorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase. In many cases, doorway pages are written to rank for a particular phrase and then funnel users to a single destination.
Whether deployed across many domains or established within one domain, doorway pages tend to frustrate users, and are in violation of our webmaster guidelines.
Put more simply, a doorway page usually exists purely to funnel traffic towards an affiliate click or sale without providing any real value in itself. Such examples would include:
- Parking pages that capitalize on broad-match keywords, containing huge numbers of outbound links for a specific phrase, often with affiliate IDs tags and such.
- Pages that purport to be about one topic (e.g. “printer maintenance”) but lead to a product related to something else (e.g. “buy cheap printers”).
- Affiliate pages for multi-level marketing (MLM) and ‘get rich quick’ schemes (e.g. “Earn $X,XXX working at home”), where the introductory page acts as a teaser for an idea rather than containing any real information.
Any page that’s the target of an AdWords campaign that does any of these is likely not to meet either webmaster or PPC guidelines.
What a Doorway Page is Not
Some of the sites that have been suspended from AdWords are crying foul that Google has banned them for handling payments or conversions on third party sites. First, Google doesn’t penalize links to third party sites – in fact, they reward them otherwise the entire PageRank model wouldn’t work. Furthermore, if they penalized sites that have payment systems or shopping carts, any site using Google Checkout would be banned from AdWords too.
A doorway page is not:
- A page using an externally-hosted payment system or shopping cart.
- A page with outbound links.
- Any page hosting affiliate ads or advertising.
The AdWords Quality Score
Google’s intention here comes down to the quality score metric used in PPC. Their motivation is to provide advertising that is genuinely useful in search, and likely to lead to conversions. When you start an AdWords campaign, Google will show the quality score for your chosen keywords, advertising text and landing page. Even if your landing page is not a doorway page, ads with low quality scores are inevitably deactivated over time.
This has a significantly more deleterious effect on doorway pages than any almost any other type of web pages. You can spot these pages by the emphasis on words like “secret”, “insider”, “tricks”, etc. or phrases promising to provide information that “they don’t want you to know” – and Google can spot them too.
Organic vs. Paid Search
Finally, there is confusion between organic and paid search, both of which operate under completely different rules and signals. In paid search, there is a clearly-defined set of rules provided by the search engine, whether it’s Google, Yahoo! or Bing or anyone else. Their terms tend to be more restrictive and conservative and, most importantly, are usually reviewed by a human before going live.
In organic search, GoogleBot crawls and indexes sites without human involvement, and will allow many pages that are typically excluded in PPC campaigns. While both frown upon doorway pages, MLM and affiliate-driven directories and sites will likely have an easier time in the organic listings than PPC.
Overall, if you’re selling a legitimate product or service, you have nothing to worry about. Remember that Google makes money from paid search because the ads are useful to its customers, and there’s no attempt to remove advertisers that are provide valuable content.
Recent Comments