What To Do If You Have Been Slapped

A lot of people ask me what to do if you have been slapped by Google.  Once slapped, an account would definitely lose a lot of opportunities to earn more.  The good news is that, there is always a way to recover if your account has been slapped by Google, although it might not be the easiest for the permanent slap.

First of all, you need to know the reason why you got slapped by Google.  It is logical that if you know the reason for the slap, it will be easier to identify some possible solutions to your problem.  Let’s just hope though that you are not being penalized with a permanent slap.

It takes patience and effort to know how you can recover from a Google Slap. Some of the top reasons why you get slapped is because of the poor content of your website.  Google wants to maintain its reputation of being the best search engine.  To do this, it needs to protect its brand by showing only quality sites on its search results and what’s going to show on ads.

Know Why You Have Been Slapped by Google

This is because once a user clicks on a search result or an ad link that goes to a really bad site, the user will not blame the advertiser, but Google.  Google wants to prevent this by making sure that advertisers follow their editorial guidelines.

Apart from that, your page contents need to be relevant to the keywords that your account bids on.  Otherwise, you will get a really low Quality Score, which places strain on your account.  To be AdWords compliant, make sure that your landing page has content which exactly match the keywords that you made a bid on.

You might want to know what to do if you have been slapped because your landing page is a squeeze page which does not link to the other web pages.  To avoid this, you need to have a minimum of two links in the footer for other sites, which can be on other domains or on the same domain.  Google would not want squeeze pages and would definitely slap you for using this.

Do not make the mistake of putting only attractive graphics on your landing page or website but with too little text content.  Google will find it difficult to read text that’s part of a graphics file, so you need to have all of your copy content in text.

If you have Ad Groups which are non-targeted, which means that you have too many keywords in a single group, you could also get slapped.  To avoid the Slap, you have to break up these large Ad Groups into highly targeted but smaller Ad Groups.

Know What To Do If You Have Been Slapped Already

If you notice, the things mentioned above should have been done to avoid the Slap from the very beginning.  However, you might be reading this article until this part because you want to know what to do if you have been slapped already.

If you gave gotten slapped already,  there’s always a way for you to recover, but again, it’s not supposed to be a permanent slap as it can be a hopeless case.  Once you launch a new campaign, someone will manually go through your page to see if it follows the editorial guidelines.  Once the reviewer would find out that you are violating some guidelines, you could get another bad slap.

To recover from the slap, first, delete the campaign, then copy and paste all of your Ad Groups into a totally new campaign.  This can be an easier option than to have to start all over again from a slapped campaign.  If you are slapped one more time, you need to remove all of the slapped keywords, delete the campaign, then launch it again.

Third, you can get a new AdWords account, though be wary that it’s easy for Google to trace your identity with sources of information like your credit card number, IP address, and other forms of verification.  When everything fails, it is best to get a new domain, and create a brand new AdWords account.