Google Update of July 2006
By Michaela Cernescu
I know it has been a tough month for lots of AdWords advertisers, caused by the recent Google’s Landing Page Algorithm update.
As all of us will be affected by these changes, I decided to share with you what I have learned about them.
In a nutshell, the Google AdWords changes are a
loud cry for high quality pages!
The changes were created with a noble cause in mind – to improve the web.
I hope it will be good on a long term-basis, but lots of people will be affected now.
I did as much research as I could and came to the conclusion that these are the hardest hit 4 sites:
- Squeeze pages (the lending pages whose single purpose is to gather an email address in exchange for a free report that is not always really free !)
- One Page Sales Letter Web Site or Pitch Page
- Affiliate Web Sites
- Web Sites built for Google AdSense
However, to explain the New Landing Page Algorithm I’ll start by defining the new terms created by Google:
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Quality Score = this is the basis for measuring the quality of your keyword and determining your minimum bid on Google, the quality of your ad’s landing page, and other relevancy factors. (WOW! The devil is in details…)
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Landing Page = an active Web Page where customers “land” when they click on your ad. The web address for this page is also called a destination URL or clickthrough URL
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Daily budget = it is, as it has always been, the amount you’re willing to spend on a specific AdWords campaign per day
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Ad Served Percentage (%) = shows the frequency of an ad’ being shown, as compared to the rest of active ads within the same Ad Group
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Display URL = this is the URL displayed on your ad to identify your site to users (limit 35 characters). It can be different from the URL your ad links to, but it should be an actual URL that is part of your site
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Ad Delivery = how fast your ads are shown within a specific AdWords campaign each day. When you select a budget for your campaign you can choose: 1) Standard Delivery – the ads impressions will be spread across the day, 2) Accelerated Delivery - the adds will be displayed as often as possible until your budget is reached. In both cases if your budget is set below the system-recommended budget, you ads may not receive all possible impressions
Now that we’re all talking the same language, let’s see what Google’s New Landing Page Algorithm means.
The idea is not new as, in December 2005, Google announced they were beginning to implement “The New Landing Page quality score”. What happened during the first 2 weeks of July is just an Algorithm update.
What’s new now?
In addition to evaluating your keywords and ads, Google now:
- Scrutinizes your landing pages
- Calculates a “Quality score” for every landing page
What is “Quality Score”, in Google Words:
Quality Score is determined by
- your keyword’s clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google
- relevance of your ad text
- "historical keyword performance” on Google
Well, it makes sense, even though “historical keyword performance” looks subjective to me. We don’t know historical keyword performance when we choose them!
Quality Score measurements make the advertiser increase relevancy!
But how good, fair and balanced can they be when determining this Quality Score.
Up till now we have already noticed advertisers whose on line business has been shut down.
Let’s not panic and try to overcome by educating ourselves about what Google wants!
The Google point of view is that some advertisers are delivering "a poor user experience” (which actually means pages with a low Quality Score, which are required to pay much more for their clicks).
Important Note: In other words instead of jumping to increase the pay per click, we’d better try to create high quality score pages.
What Google wants to see is:
- Relevant and substantial content. TIP: in AdWords, link to a page on your site that provides the most useful and accurate information about the product/service in your ad
- Ensure that your landing page is relevant to your keywords and your ad test
- Distinguish sponsored links from the rest of your site content. So far, it has been good practice to make outgoing links blend in with the rest of a page’s content because this is a sure way to get more clicks, which translate into more money for you
- Well, now Google wants those ads to be clearly marketed as sponsored links
- Try to provide info without requiring registering, or providing a preview of what users will get by registering. WOW again! Attention squeeze pages authors! If you’ve got a squeeze page, you are going against Google’s guideline! It will now be harder to acquire a big opt in list!
- Build pages that provide substantial and useful info to users. This means providing additional info beyond what the user may have seen in your ad or on the page prior to clicking on your ad
- You should have unique content as well. Up to now, using free articles from article directories has been used and abused, it has been a great way to build content fast, but now you ‘ll pay a penalty in your AdWord cost.
In other words, Google doesn’t like pages with lots of ads or duplicate content – GET ORIGINAL CONTENT!
If you don’t do this:
- Your position in the Search Engine Results pages will suffer
- Your cost per click (CPCs) will go up
So, what do we do now?
If your site is affected try to:
- Update your site or landing page using Google’s guidelines (the points you just read above), then ask them to re-evaluate your site, call Google at 866.246.6453 and ask for a “manual review” of your site. Google will do it, but I have no idea how long it takes!
- Improve your landing page’s Quality Score(QS)
To improve the QS:
- Remove all AdSense ads from your landing page
- Create more original content for your site
- Add more content to your squeeze pages without too many repeats, or move this page to another site you own, a site with good page ranking and lots of content, as the squeeze page will inherit some of the main domain’s quality score
- If you have 2-5% keyword density on your landing pages, Google will improve your quality score a little
- Use your keywords in your landing page’s filename. If you are bidding on antiques, make your landing page antiques.html
- The landing page’s title tag matches the keywords you’re targeting
- Use the header tags: H1, H2, H3 and add keywords you’ve been bidding on to those headers
- It’s a good idea to add a few text links on your landing page that use your targeted key words as anchor text
That’s all I know at this point!
Copyright 2006 Michaela Cernescu
About the Author
Michaela Cernescu is an experienced eBayer, Education Specialist trained by eBay, Internet Marketer, Info Products writer and Affiliate. Visit
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