I wrote earlier this week about the news that Google was instituting some new landing page calculations in the "Quality Score" that it uses to figure out how much AdWords advertisers will need to pay for their listings. The announcement has generated quite a bit of buzz in the industry and not all of it is positive. Kevin Ryan makes some good points today in his ClickZ column about how Google's changes could impact the average marketer.

The ironic thing about these changes is that PPC ads used to be the one area of search marketing where site owners could feed a click straight to a highly interactive Flash-style landing page without worrying about the way it would impact their search rankings. Unfortunately, that may no longer be the case and PPC marketers may need to start thinking about how "relevant" their landing pages will appear to be to Google's spiders.

From the article:

Google's quest to include landing-page scent exposes many marketers to significant risks, because marketers often build high-converting landing pages and microsites specifically for PPC (define) search and other media buys. These sites and pages are generally built with no regard to SEO (define). If they rely on graphics or an embedded Flash movie to provide a strong scent, Google may mistakenly believe the page to be is less relevant. Marketers with these high-converting landing pages may lose all their advantage if their Quality Scores drop.