Early on in my affiliate marketing career, I learned about and started using Pay Per Click search engines (PPC’s). Goto.com was the first PPC, they invented the system of bidding your site to the top of their search engine for your selected keyphrases. Goto.com later became Overture.com then was swallowed up by Yahoo.com. In the mean time, dozens of other smaller PPC’s came along, some lasted others didn’t.
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Soon after PPC’s became accepted as a viable way to advertise, various scripts started popping up to help you manage your bids. For $49 you could get a script that would log in to your various PPC accounts and check that your listings were still within the ranges you had set, these scripts would add or deduct bid money as necessary. The bigger advertisers loved these scripts because it meant that someone was minding their bids 24/7, and in many cases these scripts could save them big money.http://www.affiliateprofitcenter.com/wp-includes/js/tinymce/plugins/wordpress/img/trans.gif" alt="" class="mceWPmore mceItemNoResize" title="More..." />

Back then, PPC’s were easy – as long as you had the money to spend, you could get your site listed on the top of the engines, and they’d stay there until either you were outbid or your credit card was maxed out.

Well let’s fast forward a few years... Enter Google

Google (of course) redefined the PPC system. Instead of simply bidding your way to the top of the engine, Google instituted and has continued to refine a scoring process to determine just how clickable your ads are. Google reasoned that an ad with a high CTR (one that gets clicked on a lot) can make more money, even if the advertiser pays less per click- then another advertiser that’s not getting clicked on as much..

Got that? Then along comes the Google Slap!

Google is always looking for relevancy. Google figures, that if a user clicks on a search result (whether it be organic or a PPC ad) and doesn’t find what they’re looking for, they (the user) won’t be happy and just may turn to another search engine in the future.

So with that in mind, Google is now looking more at the landing page that the ad is going to. Using both spiders and human editors, Google now scores your landing page. They’re going way beyond just checking that the page is relevant to the ad, they’re also looking for real content (dare I say a real website). If Google likes your landing page, if they deem it to be more then just a single page with some affiliate links, you’ll score higher and ultimately pay less per click to have your site listed. Conversely, if Google doesn’t like your landing page, you’ll have to pay a higher rate just to get listed. How does $10/click sound?

All these changes are actually good for us little guys. You see, the Google slap got rid of a lot of spammier sites (that’s what it was intended to do). Now, we no longer have to compete with these one-page wonders. We can go back to doing our jobs and concentrate on quality; in our ads and on our websites. If we keep focused and keep testing, the end result will be happier visitors and a fatter bottom line.