I have researched as much as I could, and came to the conclusion that 4 types of sides are hit the hardest:



?Squeezes pages (the lending pages, whose single purpose is to gather an email address in exchange for a free report, which is actually not always free !)

?One Page Sales Letter Web Site or Pitch Page

?Affiliate Web Sites

?Web Sites build for Google AdSense

As all of us will be affected by the changes, I decided to share with you what I learned about them.

The Google AdWords changes in a nut shell are a "loud cry for high quality pages"! The changes were made for a noble cause : to improve the web.

They will be a good thing in the long range, but for the time being, a lot of people have to suffer.

However, to explain the New Landing Page Algorithm, I'll start defining the new terms Google has created:

?Quality Score = it 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...)

?Landing Page = an active Web Page where customers will ?land? when they click your ad. The web address for this page is also called a destination URL or clickthrough URL

?Daily budget = it is, as it has always been, the amount you're willing to spend on a specific AdWords campaign per day.

?Ad Served Percentage (%) = this represents how often an ad has been shown in connection to the rest of the active ads within the same Ad Group.

?Display URL = it is the URL displayed on your ad to identify your site to users (limit 35 char., it can be different to the URL your ad links to, but it should be an actual URL that is part of your site)

?Ad Delivery = how quickly 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 all are speaking the same language, let's see what Google's New Landing Page Algorithm means.

The idea is not a new one, Google announced in December 2005 that they have begun to implement ?The New Landing Page quality score?. What happened in the first 2 week of July is just an update of the Algorithm.

What is new now?

In addition to evaluating your keywords and your 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 performances when we choose them!

The Quality Score measurements make the advertiser increase relevancy!

But how good, fair and balanced can they be when they determine this Quality Score?

Until till now, we already noticed:

? advertisers whose on line business has been shut down.

? a friend of mine told my that class action suits already exists.

? a general resentment toward what is seen as ?unfair? changes still exists.

Let's not panic and try to overcome this 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, those are required to pay much more for their clicks).

Important Note: In other words, instead of jumping and increasing the pay per click, we better try creating 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. Up tol now, it has been a 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 having to register, or provide a preview of what users will get by registering. WOW again! Attention squeez page authors: If you've got a squeeze page, this means 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.

In other words, Google doesn't like pages with a lot of ads or pages that have duplicate contents - GET ORIGINAL CONTENT!

If you don't do this:

?Your position in the Search Engine Results pages will be affected.

?Your cost per click (CPCs) will go up,

You should have unique content as well. Until 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 will pay a penalty in your AdWord cost.

In Conclusion, what do we need to 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, ask for a ?manual review? of your site, Google will do it, although I have no idea how long it will take!

?Improve the Quality Score(QS) of your landing page.

To improve the QS:

?Remove all AdSense ads from your landing page.

?Create more original content for your site.

?In your squeeze pages, add more content but without a lot of repeats, or move this page to another site you own, a site with good page rank and lots of content because 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've been targeting.

?Use the header tags: H1, H2, H3 and add the keywords you've bidding on the those headers.

?It is good to add a few text links on your landing page that use your targeted key words as anchor text.

This is all I know at this point.

To our success

Michaela Cernescu