While many of you are fond of using whatever works to a degree, there are those times when reigning yourself in a bit is in order before doing some things, that tied together, or seperately, can hurt you, your clients, or your network(s).

A quick rundown of a number of the things that may not be in your best interest that are simple to spot.

• Hidden text
• Major Keyword stuffing
• Duplicating sites to interlink.

Now we all know about these things, and there are far more than I have listed here, but sometimes we just can not refrain from using them. When it gets extremely dangerous to do so is when you do all of them at once. The reason for this post was due to running into such a network this morning while searching for a place to get my youngest daughter a pair of primigi shoes that she wanted. To me, a seasoned search optimizer, it seemed as if what they are doing is just insanely obvious and bordering on just plain dumb. Same content, same color scheme, same whois info, same host, even the same template in some cases. You decide for yourself:

http://www.kidsnshoes.com
http://www.usansites.com
http://www.kidsnsites.com
http://www.kidsnfashion.com
http://www.kidsnjumpingjacks.com
http://www.kidsntoys.com
http://www.kidsnfootwear.com
http://www.newenglandnsites.com
http://www.sandysshoes.com
http://www.kidsshoewarehouse.com

Keep in mind this is a small sampling of websites this marketer is using.

This has been a public service rant by yours truly.

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We have been running quite a few adwords campaigns for clients for years now, and new changes, while showing some decent improvements, are showing some large issues. Quite a few people are talking about the quality score issues many are having with their landing pages of course, but few, if any, have touched upon the fact that the quality bot that visits your landing pages is heavily based on keywords and not on the landing page URL's.

What this means is that if you have 3,000 keywords, and only use a single landing page URL, their quality bot actually visits and downloads that page upwards of 3,000 times in a single day. This, in my opinion, is reckless design on the part of Googles coders and engineers. This method can cost webmasters quite a bit of extra bandwidth as well as taking server resources which could be used better towards making the website a fraction faster for live human visitors.

The reason google does it is plain and very understandable, to be able to apply a qualiy score to landing pages. The setbacks that googles quality bot faces are that many webmasters may use the same URL for a landing page, but change parts of the page based upon the query sent, or from the referer header sent, to tailor the page to the exact query the searcher made to find that adwords advertisement. While I understand the reasoning behind all this, I still see several common sense approaches to doing it without having to download the above examples landing page 3,000 times.

The landing page URL is entered by the advertiser upon creating an ad group, so google already knows if it has visited that landing page before. Now, to take into considerations that the landing page may change based on referer or query string, googles quality bot has but to visit that page from several keywords and from several different class C's to notice a pattern.

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