I often see a post here or there, on a daily basis, of an AdWords advertiser complaining their quality score has significantly dropped and they have been "Google Slapped." But in the past few days, I have seen an influx of these types of posts. So I suspect a new quality score algorithm was pushed through that Google did not deem significant enough to mention on their blog, but which did have significant impact on many advertisers.
We have two new threads that have complaints from advertisers. One is at DigitalPoint Forums and the other is at WebmasterWorld. Here are some isolated posts from those threads:
I have woken up today to find 2 very profitable campaigns with no sales. So after checking google adwords it looks like someone has done some sort of manual review of my site or something as all my major campaigns have either got:9/10 quality scores click through rate of around 2% but getting hit with £2 bids on a niche that has been operating fine for the past few months.
On the other main campaign I have quality scores of 1/10 for almost all keywords dispite prior to this 4-5%ctr ads and landing page optimised for the terms I am targeting.
A lot of our keywords have dropped QS from 8ish down to 1/10.The diagnostics say that the ads and ad text are fine but landing page needs improving. Google have told me lots of times before that the site is great so a bit confused.
Hopefully you were not hit by this latest slap.
Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.
