Google’s landing page quality score is meant to algorithmically eliminate low quality and obvious spam sites from the AdWords advertising platform by making it unaffordable. The new update puts pressure on advertisers to develop search engine friendly landing pages with readable content. But even among those who have developed spider-friendly pages, this update has stirred a lot of anger because:
1. The system still makes judgment errors.
2. Well-performing one-shot sites saw their minimum bids skyrocket.
3. Advertisers playing around with multiple domains sometimes saw their minimum bids go up.
4. Advertisers using the system to quickly make money through dubious means or with quickly setup sites stopped making profits.
Advertisers in the first three categories have solutions to the minimum bid problem. The last set of advertisers does not.
The First Three
The frequency of judgment errors seems about at the same level as it was before, when minimum bids without landing page quality were employed. If one of your minimum bids looks like an error in judgment, call Google and they might fix it. Otherwise employ the usual means of making ad text and landing page copy more relevant to the keyword. All the sites that I advertise that were legitimate sites, employing typical advertising methods, went unaffected by the quality score update. If you fall under this category, you probably shouldn’t be affected by the update.
Over time, AdWords gave rise to a lot of very effective one-shot sites that had low bids and high conversion rates. These were sites that might have displayed only one page islands. The page may have been a newsletter or whitepaper signup, or something along these lines. These pages didn’t provide much content, and didn’t establish reputation with the visitor, but nonetheless they often did well. In a sense, these sites employed borderline methods, and Google doesn’t approve of them. In their landing page guidelines, Google recommends providing substantial and unique content, defining your business and what it does, and notifying the visitor how his/her personal information is being treated. Advertisers employing the one-shot method can fix their landing pages up to meet Google’s guidelines if they are legitimate companies.
The final fixable category of users that had trouble with Google’s quality score employed multiple domains. The reason this could be problematic may lie in the requirement for unique content. As in SEO, AdWords advertisers should develop one domain for a set of products or services to avoid problems.
The Advertisers That Are Permanently Affected
The last set of advertisers who have problems with Google’s quality score guidelines is tough out of luck. Being an affiliate that launches a visitor into another site that is already advertising with AdWords is probably going to impact your campaigns. This is a lower quality site in the eyes of Google and probably in the eyes of most users. Also, using AdWords ads to generate revenue with more expensive AdSense ads by capitalizing on click-happy visitors is going to ruin your campaigns. These methods of making money with AdWords are getting eliminated. Advertisers are being forced to provide more content of their own and to develop reputable domains.
Conclusion
Among advertisers using search engine friendly landing pages, a lot of controversy developed from Google’s quality score updates. This is because the update required some users to update their pages to stay profitable and completely eliminated other advertisers from the pay per click arena.
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Steve Loszewski is a Google AdWords qualified professional. He optimizes campaigns for Pure Visibility, a pay per click company.