Google AdWords recently updated their system to include content network quality scores and to include content gathered by spiders to grade landing pages. This update affects minimum bids in the search network and distribution throughout the content network. Landing pages that aren’t relevant to the keyphrases being bid on or to the text of the ads showing are assigned low quality scores and cause keyphrases to have high minimum bids. For the content network, if ads or keyphrases are unrelated to a site’s content, have poor performance history on similar sites, or have low quality landing pages, the ads will not be shown unless the max CPC is set high.

Purpose Behind the Landing Page Change

These changes are supposed to improve the relevance of landing pages and the relevance of ads shown on the content network. It had a large impact on “made for AdSense” sites using pay per click advertising, as well as others. Some “made for AdSense” sites would bid on cheap keyphrases and load a landing page full of content ads that would earn the site owner revenue when any of the ads were clicked on (AdSense arbitrage). These landing pages would be devoid of content, so if a visitor was going to go any further through the site, he/she would either click on an ad or click the back button. These low quality landing pages were becoming more common in Google AdWords.

Unrelated ads show all over the content network (even after AdWords’ algorithm change). A lot of this has more to do with the quality of sites that AdWords allows in its AdSense program than with the quality of ads showing. AdWords still does a poor job of targeting ads to content unless a site is very focused on a particular topic.

Rising Minimum Bid Trend

These changes are all a part of a rising minimum bid trend that has been going on for quite a while. One of the major selling points of Google AdWords was that you could generate traffic for pennies a click. This isn’t as true anymore, and a lot of advertisers are in an uproar about it. One important consequence of this change is that successful whiz-bang ad pages are going to suffer as Google tries to weed out the spammers.

The Important Footnote

Google is very confident in its algorithm, and this is an ambitious undertaking. In Google’s pages about landing page quality, they add a link to their webmaster guidelines, explaining features of a “search engine friendly” site. This link is completely understated. Webmasters create sites that are not search engine friendly all the time. It is especially done with sites that are made to look flashy and professional. In fact, “flashy and professional” is practically synonymous with “not search engine friendly.” THIS IS HUGE. Click-bang ad pages are often times going to be made to look “flashy and professional.” This means the AdWords spiders won’t be able to see their content and will assign the page a low quality grade. Search engine optimization has just made its first major step into pay per click. SEOs around the world should be saying, “hooray.” AdWords’ over-complex system makes hiring a third party even more necessary.

Future of Landing Page Quality

AdWords makes note that landing page quality does not affect ad rankings in the search network. This is somewhat perplexing since landing page quality is supposed to be a part of the overall quality score, which is supposed to affect an ad’s ranking. Ignoring this, it seems plausible that AdWords might make landing page quality affect ad ranking in the future, when AdWords’ spiders get better at what they do. This would improve user experience (according to Google’s logic), but it might cause a decrease in ad revenue. Ads with high click-through rates can have poor landing pages. It’s a change to watch out for though.