Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Quick to judge, slow to correct

Last night I made a typo in my .css file that caused my BCL pages to not look right. The banner (comprised of 2 images) displayed one image on top of the other, and the graphics that normally accompany the navigation menu weren't showing.  Other than those aesthetic problems, the site maintained full functionality.

My ads ran for maybe an hour in this state, and Google dropped my keyword statuses for BCL pages  to "Rarely shown due to low quality score".  They had previously been flagged for a low quality score (haven't figured that one out yet, as they meet all Adwords guidelines for landing pages), but were still showing normally with an "Eligible" status.

So, within the span of one hour Google demoted all the pages of that campaign, but as of this morning, the campaign has been running with all pages displaying properly (for over an hour), and the home page and main other page of campaign actually fully xhtml compliant per W3C validator.  I'm still waiting to see when Google will update the status, if they do.

11:14 ET Campaign running 2 hours now today... no update