Google recently made changes to the policies concerning sitelinks that are used to determine the ad serving for webmasters that have Ad words running for their respective sites. If you use sitelinks with your Ad campaigns or plan to use them, read on...
If you want to learn more about Adwords or Sitelinks you may visit this help centre thread. In general sitelinks help your readers(rather the net users who see your Ads) reach specific parts of your website more quickly. So webmasters create Ad campaigns to target users and make them land on some specific pages of the site through these sitelinks. The current policy for sitelinks ensures the users have a good experience while clicking your Ads. This in turn requires all sitelinks used by you (as a webmaster) are unique. Unique in the sense that they point to different parts of your site that have unique content. Thus making the page a relevant content destination for the user.
The problem that Google detailed in the mail that notified us of the policy change is that they recently noticed sitelinks that are not unique in terms of content. In other words these sitelinks basically use the same landing page as their destination or may be pages which are duplicated as far as the content is concerned. This clearly turns out to be a bad experience for user. The search giant clearly noticed this and thus will soon be enforcing changes to the required policy.
Mail says the initial focus will be on the "new and recently changed sitelinks". The verification will be while serving the Ads for a site. As the Ads are being served the sitelinks will be verified to check if they meet the standards already laid out. If they for one reason or another are found to violate any terms then the Ads will be restricted from appearing. The mail further explains the impact these changes will being on performance as:
"Having fewer eligible sitelinks could keep your ad from showing in the larger 2-line and 3-line formats, where more eligible sitelinks are required. Remember, larger formats are more visible and typically have higher average clickthrough rates (CTR). And if you don't have enough eligible sitelinks in your campaign, then your ads may not display sitelinks at all."
Google further states that since the clean up from webmaster side may take a while, they are "delaying more proactive enforcement with existing sitelinks for a few months". But also warns the webmasters to not wait till the last minute. Here are a few steps you may start with:
- Log into the AdWords interface and click on the "Ad Extensions" tab.
- Select "Sitelinks Extensions" from the drop down menu.
- Sort your sitelink extensions by impressions or clicks by clicking on the column header.
- Click on each sitelink in the top campaign and follow it through to its landing page (there's no charge for these clicks).
- Fix any duplicates you find in each campaign by hovering over the extension area and clicking the pencil icon.
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