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Four Tricks to Gain An Unfair Advantage on AdWords
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David Rodnitzky (37 Posts)
David Rodnitzky is founder and CEO of PPC Associates, a Google AdWords Certified Company. PPC Associates helps clients drive ROI from AdWords and Facebook PPC with a unique combination of big agency expertise and small agency service. Contact David at david@ppcassociates.com to get a free quote on how he can help improve your SEM.
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Why would you use a 404 (file not found) redirect instead of a 301 (Page Permanently Moved)?
Hi John, you would not use a 301 because the sub-domain does not actually exist. With a 404, you can create fake sub-domains and directories on the fly, like comment-by-john.searchmarketingstandard.com. A lot faster than actually creating a page and then using a 301 to redirect to the home page. Hope that answers your question. David
If I’m not mistaken, Google will allow the Display Url San-Mateo.Mortgage-Finder.com if the destination url is mortgagefinder.com, even if the display url doesn’t really exist. So you may not need any redirect.
You could also use the non-existent display url MortgageFinder.com/San-Mateo
Seems like that would make sense. Afterall I quite often remove the www. which is afterall a subdomain and then change my landing page to somewhere deep in my site.
The 404 display subdomain trick is a nice way to get keywords into your ad – and get them bolded on a search. But it’s easy to get carried away
DISPLAY URL = {KeyWord:Fake}.mydomain.com
or
DISPLAY URL = mydomain.com/{KeyWord:Fake}.html
LOL!
@ David (and David) .. that’s my understanding also. – David
Abbottsys – I don’t think you can use dynamic keyword insertion in the display URL, if that is what you are suggesting? If I am wrong about that, let me know, I would love to be able to use that as an additional trick!
We use DNS made easy for our domains and they let you use a wildcard for your subdomain so everything is forwarded.
*.mysite.com for example.
Ok, no offense David because this is hardly the first time I’ve seen this. However, I’m always a little miffed when I see a headline like “Four Tricks to Gain An Unfair Advantage on AdWords” and then I click and see that they’re trotting out tired old stuff like geo-targeting and DKI. I’d call those two “basic campaign management” rather than tricks.
#4 is actually a trick though, good one.
404 redirects? Really? Does the adwords / media bot that checks your site for quality and keywords not notice that the header is a 404 page? As a result why would it want to serve a page which technically (to the bot) does not exist?
I would expect that a seperate sub domain, with these same pages on / being generated but serving back a Status 200 in the header instead of 404 would give a far better quality score, not look so fishy and could actually be useful. If you spit all those generated links out into a sitemap of some description (on the seperate site to your main site) then it could provide some extra content for indexing and using again in the future?
Just a thought.
Sunny
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Forgot to say that these are otherwise excellent tips! Nice post
Sunny, the AdWords bot may check your page, but keep in mind that the 404 only applies to the *display URL* and not the *destination URL.* Hence, the actual landing page the user (or bot) is sent to is likely to be a quality, highly-targeted page, but the URL that they see in the ad text is a fictitious one designed to increase CTR and nothing more.
I’m not techy enough to know whether a 200 or a *.html would work better for quality score than a 404, but since several people have suggested it, it sounds like it is at least an appropriate alternative.
Thanks for the comment (oh, and don’t forget to subscribe to the Search Marketing Standard feed as well as my personal blog, http://www.blogation.net)!
David
U can have any URL in the “display URL” field…no redirects, subdomains and 404 pages
Cheers,
Marius,
http://www.dnl.ro/serviciiconexe.htm
Ya know, I think I’ve seen several instances where you can sneak a non-existent Display URL through the AdWords bot. But the redirect would be a good measure to make sure your ad variation doesn’t get kicked back.