Mountain View, California — Word is out that after quietly experimenting in Brazil, Spanish-speaking Latin America, Spain, and Portugal, Google has gone through another round of algorithmic tweaks to address content quality in the organic search results. As a result of these experiment, Google is announcing today that landing page quality, or the “relevance” component of Quality Score, will be weighted more heavily than previously.
This latest disclosure indicates that ads with landing pages that Google reckons to be most relevant to the query will be able to rank higher for lower cost-per-click bids. Besides, these updates have collectively become known by the nickname Project Panda.
Explains Jonathan Alferness, a Director of Product Management at Google: “What we have discovered is that the ads at the top of the page typically get more clicks and are rightly rewarded for strong relevance. But some of the ads further down the page might have particularly good ‘post-click’ experiences and deserve a boost.”
In the past, landing page quality was usually handled as if it were “policy”: that is, there was an attempt to look for what Alferness calls “negative signals”. An advertiser that breached the “policy” would find its ads suspended, for all intents and purposes. Some would even have their accounts deleted. This, says Alferness, means the user experience is not what it could be. Hence the change to give more weight to landing page quality. “In the end, we believe that this will result in better quality experience for the users.”
More recently, perhaps to get things rolling for the current wave of testing that will incorporate a broader-based assessment of landing page relevance into the ranking formula, Google began making a distinction between landing page quality and landing page policy. That being said, for the most part, Google will be evaluating advertisers “on the same basic criterion as in the past,” says Alferness.
Alferness advises that advertisers “create a page for the aggregate set of users that is natural or appropriate to what they are looking for.”
Landing page quality has long been a factor in Google AdWords, but more as a negative signal. The new update will ascribe landing page quality a positive value, incentivizing advertisers to make sure the landing page’s keywords and content are closely aligned with the keywords for which they are bidding. Ads with high landing page quality will get a “strong boost” upward in the auction, according to Alferness.
Alferness further states that Google will crawl the landing pages associated with every ad and make a determination as to its quality. “What we always ask our advertisers to focus on is relevance–choose a landing page or site experience that is both relevant to the keywords that you are targeting and also a good experience for end users,” said Alferness. “This is just continuing to sort of push on those best practices. It gives us the ability to really reward those advertisers that have been doing this, whose landing pages really are some of the best in our systems.”
Nevertheless, that sounds fair enough, and if an advertiser’s landing page was particularly terrible or misleading, advertisers could have their ads rejected or their accounts suspended or revoked–depending on how bad the policy violation was.
For smart, user-sensitive advertisers, the change will likely be noticed only as a positive. The change will roll out in the next week or two. Advertisers may see some variations in ad position and keyword Quality Score at first, but things should settle down within a couple of weeks, according to Google.