Landing Pages Now Affect AdWords Quality Score!

Previously to this announcement from Google:-

http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/10/ads-quality-improvements-rolling-out.html

It was a common misconception that your landing page affected Quality Score.

It didn’t. What it did do was affect your minimum first page bid estimates. This discouraged people from having rubbish landing pages, but if you could create fantastic ads, bid high to start with and get a great CTR, then this was a minor inconvenience.

Not any more apparently…

When searching on Google, users appreciate results that are relevant and deliver a great experience after they click. In August, we announced trials in Brazil, Spanish-speaking Latin America, Spain, and Portugal1 that increased the weight given to relevance and landing page quality in determining Quality Score and how ads are ranked on Google. The goal was to improve the user experience with search ads. Based on the results we’ve been seeing, we’re now rolling these changes out globally over the coming weeks.

This is one more nail in the coffin for affiliate marketers who want to use AdWords to sell other peoples products and services (Google clearly wants to be the only affiliate allowed to use Google).

They also explicitly state landing pages should :-

Feature original content that can’t be found on another site. This guideline is particularly applicable to resellers whose site is identical or highly similar to another reseller’s or the parent company’s site, and to affiliates that use the following types of pages:

Bridge pages: Pages that act as an intermediary, whose sole purpose is to link or redirect traffic to the parent company
Mirror pages: Pages that replicate the look and feel of a parent site; your site should not mirror (be similar or nearly identical in appearance to) your parent company’s or any other advertiser’s site

Provide substantial information. If your ad links to a page consisting mostly of ads or general search results (such as a directory or catalog page), it must also provide additional, unique content.

So they are clamping down on people who have more than one (similar) web site, and more than one AdWords ad on the SERPs at any given time. Again – Google want to be the only firm allowed to ‘double dip’ in AdWords.

They also now state that user reviews are important i.e. you must :-

Honor the deals and offers that you promote in your ad.
Deliver products and services as promised.
Only charge users for the products and services that they order and successfully receive.

So, for anyone who has one web site, that sells their own stuff, and has good reviews from customers – will this have any major effect? I don’t think so.

Everyone else – I would start getting worried!

For anyone wanting basic information on Quality Score this is quite a good little video:-

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