Does Google Hate Squeeze Pages?
William from Ohio wrote me:
I’ve built my site the way all the top internet marketers say I should. I’m sending narrowly targeted traffic from Adwords to my Squeeze page and getting optins. And I was actually making money up till a month ago. Now I heard that Google now hates squeeze pages. Is that true? What should I do?
Hello William. The short answer is No, Google does NOT hate squeeze pages.
What they hate are sites that are short on content, quality, and meaning and long on Marketing Tactics.
What you’ve learned from all the top marketers still remains substantially true. Sending someone to a page that offers an optin is a good strategy and works very well. But if that’s all that is on your website, then Google is going to charge you a LOT of money for the clicks you want to send there.
You just need to learn how to implement a Squeeze page strategy properly onto your site, and take into account Google’s new policies.
Two little excerpts from Google’s Site Quality Guidelines make it clear that they don’t hate squeeze pages. Here’s what they say:
- Try to provide information without requiring users to register. Or, provide a preview of what users will get by registering.
- You should have unique content (should not be similar or nearly identical in appearance to another site).
So, have content about your topic that users can see without opting in. But don’t make it just any content. Reprinted articles — the kind that appear on dozens of websites — are often disqualified by Google when indexing your site. Make it good, relevant and unique content that you either write yourself or have written for you.
One really easy thing to do is to take a portion of your commercial product (the one you’re selling) or your free report (or whatever your reward is for opting in) and put some of that content on your site.
That information is more than likely unique, and providing a taste of the product’s content likely won’t hurt your sales. In fact, there’s a good chance it will increase your sales or optin rate.
There are more solutions to this problem, and information about properly implementing squeeze pages and sales pages onto your website in my Free Report, available on this site.
See that link at the top right corner? The one underneath the word “Download”? That’s my Googleicious Report, and it has 27 pages about how to build your website so that Google will find it irresistable.
To Your Success,
–Mark
P.S. Did you notice how what I’m writing about here is exactly what I’m suggesting you do too? I’ve just extracted some of the text from my Free Report and repurposed it as good content for my website. Google will love that, and I’m guessing it helped you, too.
Get the Googleicious Report here.
August 29th, 2006 at 6:16 pm
Google may not hate squeeze pages, but a lot of users do. As a publisher, I understand the philosophy of “I’ll give you something (information) after you give me something (your e-mail address)” but as an end user, I seriously consider whether to give in to a squeeze page. If you’re going to use a squeeze page, you better be sure that the visitor will want that information badly, otherwise you’ll lose them early and often. Simply putting myself in the visitor’s shoes, I try to avoid using them.
August 29th, 2006 at 6:17 pm
I’m fairly new to Adwords and Adsense, so I’m mostly in the “experimenting and learning” stages.
I have never tried squeeze pages for my adwords traffic. I either send them directly to a merchants web site with my affiliate link, or I send them to one of my landing pages, and then on to the merchants web site.
I have better luck sending them directly to the merchants site, mainly because I probably do not know how to create good converting landing pages. I purchased Landing Page Cash Machine and hope to remedy that situation and produce some really good landing pages.
I also plan to give squeeze pages a try because I realize that building a list is so important to building my business and having a base of customers to market products to.
My first two efforts at Adsense web sites are at army-combat-uniforms.ecomandmore.com and at zone-diet-delivery.ecomandmore.com .
I look forward to your informative posts, Mark, so keep them coming.
Lewis Poteet
August 29th, 2006 at 6:22 pm
Kevin,
Internet marketing is a numbers game. Basically the logic works like this. If the total number of people who opt in and subsequently buys is greater than the number of people who just buy outright on their first visit, then a marketer has to conclude that optins work. . . even at the expense of upsetting some visitors.
So, it becomes our job as *good* internet marketers and *good* web citizens to provide *good* value and quality content. The more people we can get to overcome their fears of opting in by providing a quality user experience before the optin, and gaining trust too, the more successful we’ll be.
And the happier people like you — those who don’t like to opt in — will also be.
Best wishes.
–Mark
August 29th, 2006 at 7:26 pm
Lewis,
When you are doing affiliate marketing, you really do need to decide if you want to send your traffic directly to the merchant’s site or your own landing page.
Here’s why.
If you are sending traffic to the merchant, you’ve got no control over anything, and you are entirely dependent on the conversion rate of the merchant’s site. So, if the site converts at a 1% rate, then you get paid on ten of 1000 visitors.
On the other hand, if you have your own landing page with an optin, you now have a second conversion rate to deal with. So if you have a 20% conversion rate for the optin, and the same 1% rate at the merchant’s site, you’re now down to being paid on just 2 out of 1000 visitors.
See the problem?
The advantage comes with how you manage your list. Of those 1000 visitors, you’ve got 200 people now on your list. Is there a related product you can also promote to your list?
If so, and you can overcome the 80% penalty you’vejust given yourself, then you’re in business.
Now. . . three other things about your post I wanted to mention. Your sites are apparently built using a system called HyperVRE. On the HyperVRE page, it says
In other words. . . it’s a system that says it will build content for you.
If that’s the case, where does that content come from? Does it really add value? (see http://www.googleicious.com/a-strategy-to-protect-your-website-revenue)
If not (and it really looks like it doesn’t), Google will eventually detect this system’s footprint (ie telltale signs of its use) and charge you very high rates to send PPC traffic there, or delist your sites from its organic search engines. (Your sites are currently not listed, and I’d say that your chances are near nil to get them listed, which means zero chance to earn the money that HyperVRE promises).
Second. . . why promote a get rich quick scheme on your web page that is all about Army Combat clothing?
And last — invest $9 and buy yourself a domain name rather than hosting at a subdomain of your web hosting company. Hosting a site of any kind on someone else’s site means that if you ever change your hosting arrangement, 100% of any links and search engine rankings you’ve accumulated would vanish instantly.
But like I said earlier. . . that’s really not an issue with thes sites.
Best Wishes.
–Mark
February 24th, 2007 at 12:26 pm
A nice post but one thing you forget to mention is that sometimes a squeeze page can actually have a positive effect on your conversions at the merchant site:
http://www.netfrontiermarketing.com/?p=41
there’s no reason why the squeeze can’t end up at the merchant page with your cookie in there…