the PPC Book|Pay Per Click Blog | Long Tail Thoughts in a Short Tail World

In another move to shake the pesky affiliates from their saddle, the Adwords team announced this week that they will require you to take a lie detector test as part of the account sign up process.

Wait, that’s the news form 2009. In the present day, Adwords did announce some changes coming soon regarding their calculation of landing page quality. Most conspicuously, these changes will effect the content network ads:

In the next few days, we will be making two changes to how AdWords evaluates landing page quality. First, we’ll begin incorporating landing page quality into the Quality Score for your contextually-targeted ads, using the same evaluation process as we do for ads showing on Google.com and the search network.

This makes sense to me and really is no big suprise, but what is more vague and won’t be measured to any extent for weeks and months to come is this comment:

Second, we’re improving our algorithm for evaluating landing page quality and incorporating landing page content retrieved by the AdWords system.

Obviously, this will make things more difficult, and not easier, for both middlemen affiliates and everyday advertisers. Google is currently in a position in which they can afford to approach the market from a position of strength, exerting their utopian advertising dreams upon everyone at will. In Larry and Sergey’s perfect world, every advertiser will be like wikipedia.com and there will be nary a call to action anywhere on your site. If you think I’m joking you don’t know Google very well.

You won’t find me complaining, though, as moves like this make professional grade PPC management a necessity, not an option. Even better if your PPC analyst has figured out the adwords algorithm;)