• ClickZ, Tuesday, July 11, 2006 11 AM

Cue a different sort of Google Dance: the company has announced via the Inside AdWords blog it's updating the way "landing page quality" is scored in order to weed out low-quality sites filled with AdWords ads. Google is upping the minimum bid to those publishers who provide a "low-quality user experience" on their landing pages, but insists that "the vast majority of advertisers will not be affected at all by this change." This is encouraging news for search marketers who link to quality content and should make it harder for those irksome affiliates hungry for referral fees from outbidding their merchant partners. The question now becomes, how does Google determine what is relevant, and will that protocol be transparent to advertisers? Google says it's been evaluating landing page quality since December and has improved its algorithm for determining quality. Part of its aim is to put restrictions on the prevalence of so-called "made for AdSense" sites in its sponsored links section, which are basically a list of text ads from Google or some other contextual provider. Google says this "click arbitrage" tactic often results in a poor user experience, so it will attempt to curtail the problem by raising the minimum bid for such advertisers.

Read the whole story at ClickZ »