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Turning AdWords On and Off is a Recipe for Disaster

McCord Web Services is a Bing Ads Accredited Professional Company and Google AdWords Certified Partner.
McCord Web Services is a Bing Ads Accredited Professional Company and Google AdWords Certified Partner.

As a Google AdWords Certified Partner, I make my living managing Google AdWords accounts. I work in a wide and diverse sectors of business. I’ve been managing Google AdWords for over nine years and so can speak on this issue authoritatively.

When I have a client who turns AdWords on and off regularly sometimes just for days and other times for long periods, I have to say that it is very difficult to effectively manage a program and generate a return on investment for the client.

Turning your AdWords account off for the weekend or when you go on vacation is not necessarily a bad thing, but I prefer to instead move a client’s budget setting down versus pausing the program. When an account has been on and off and on and off, this is what I see.

  1. Google does not know how to serve the program as history is spotty. In many cases managing a program like this will require the same amount of time in the first month (typically 8 hours of more of management for about 5 ad groups) when it has been restarted as it is like creating an account history all over again.

  2. Conversions will not start back up again at the level they were at before the account was stopped. It can sometimes take two or three weeks once an account has been off for conversions to start rolling again.
  3. In many cases page placement and cost per click will be significantly different than when the account had previously been running. As AdWords is an auction when you move out of the auction and then move back in after a month or two break, the auction prices may all have changed – higher or lower.

I prefer instead to take a great performing program that needs to be paused to a low level budget to keep placement than to totally turn a program off. It can cost so much more for your account manager to bring around a stale account than to move to a maintenance mode.

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Cross Linking Domains You Own

Cross Linking
Cross Linking

This question comes up a fair amount when we have business owners who have multiple website – “Should I link and cross link my various web properties?” First, most website owners would simply do this without thought and there is no reason why you should not if you have one or two website properties. In fact, it makes perfect sense to do so and you may actually get some backlink benefits from doing this.

There are however some situations where doing so will be a negative for your organic placement. Here are when you should be careful doing so.

  1. If you have several websites but you do not reveal that you own the properties and you are actually trying to appear as if you were different businesses, I would not cross link the sites.
  2. If the content is the same on the web properties, I would not cross link the sites.
  3. If the businesses are totally different, say one is to sell dog toys and the other is to provide web consulting. I would not cross link the sites.
  4. If you have created many, many, keyword domains and you are trying to use cross linking these multiple sites for organic placement improvement. I would not cross link the sites. You may have been able to do so before and received a benefit, but not Google is identifying sites using this tactic as link spam and is actively penalizing their organic placement on Google.com.
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Buying a Previously Used Domain Name

I’ve had a few clients buy previously used domain names when they become available. If you’ve ever considered doing this make sure you watch this important video from Matt Cutts the voice of Google to the SEO industry about the dark side to spamming and how this may impact the use of a previously used domain. http://youtu.be/lGUw9oS5csI

The bottom-line is that if you do not check to see if your prospective domain has been used to deliver spam, you may get burned. Matt even recommends checking the webmaster control panel tied to that domain and website to look for messages from Google.

If you see all kinds of spammy and questionable links pointing to and from this domain, it is by far better to start with a fresh unused domain. Even if a website is new with all new files, the Google algorithm behind the scenes may be penalizing this domain and you’d never know until you simply could not get placement when you started to use it.

The last two domain purchase I was involved with for transfers only, were both over $10,000 for the purchase. I doubt either site owner had investigated the domain and how they had been used before money exchanged hands. Be careful and when in doubt don’t put your money down go with a new domain.

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Plan Ahead with Google’s Digital Will

There have recently been some very sad stories in the news of young people who committed suicide and their parents were fighting to get access to their minor children’s or young adults online photos and Facebook pages and even emails. It is heartbreaking for these parents to hear that they have no legal access to these accounts.

Google has just introduced a new digital will that allows you to cede your online rights to items on Google properties to your loved ones before you die. It’s called the Inactive Account Manager. You can sign up or find out more on this Google page.

First off you will need to login to the Inactive Account Manager using your Google ID. From there you will add a mobile phone number for verification and security and then set a time out period, such as one month. Then you specify if you want someone else to have access to your account and their email address or if you want all your data deleted. This leaves you in control of what you have online. The choices you make will affect all Google properties like Picassa and Google+.