(say that five times fast!) Jennifer Slegg reports on the new landing page quality guidelines that are being put in place by Google in order to try and squelch the ever growing "click arbitrage" industry. Basically, Google's not real happy about site owners that buy low-cost traffic only to encourage visitors to click on higher-priced AdSense ads and is working on ways to make the practice more difficult.

Google's stated goal is "to provide a better user experience" and they plan to do this by analyzing the "quality" of a landing page in terms of relevancy to the phrase that's being bid on. Lower quality landing pages will result in higher per-click costs. More relevant and high quality landing pages will result in lower per-click costs.

From Jennifer's post...

On the flip side, however, many of those low quality advertisers might pull their ad campaigns completely, if the new minimum bid price for each keyword phrase does not make it profitable to continue advertising based upon the ROI of their own landing pages. And then they could start using more Yahoo or Microsoft for their ads, meaning YPN publishers could see an influx of these types of ads, and it could plague Microsoft ContentAds when it launches their publisher program.

As these minimum bids start to rise, it will be interesting to learn just how much they will be rising for those with lower quality landing pages. And depending on where you sit on the issue, this decision could be the best thing AdWords could have done, or the worst thing they could have done to your profits.






About the Author

Jennifer Laycock is the Editor of Search Engine Guide, an educational web site aimed at translating the search marketing world into something that small business owners can understand. Jennifer specializes in common sense search engine marketing, viral marketing and customer outreach via social media and blogs. A former search marketing consultant and in-house trainer, Jennifer’s clients have included companies like Verizon, American Greetings and Highlights for Children. Her primary clients now are a little girl named Elnora and a little boy named Emmitt.

Jennifer Laycock is the Editor of Search Engine Guide, an educational web site aimed at translating the search marketing world into something that small business owners can understand. Jennifer specializes in common sense search engine marketing, viral marketing and customer outreach via social media and blogs. A former search marketing consultant and in-house trainer, Jennifer’s clients have included companies like Verizon, American Greetings and Highlights for Children. Her primary clients now are a little girl named Elnora and a little boy named Emmitt.