Adwords to be ranked like organic results
Tuesday, May 30th, 2006
Ok, the terms and conditions for adwords has been updated if you have a read. The lines between organic and paid positions are about to blur BIG TIME!
Google are now going to be crawling the “landing” pages / the page that visitors arrive at when clicking an adwords advert. They will use this information to rank the adverts, very much like the organic / natural results that we are already used to.
It will be interesting to see how the PPC companies deal with this change. Will they start creating the landing pages, optimising them, essentially doubling the work they have to do for the ranks? PPC Advertisers are now going to have to learn the organic methods as well?
The other issue I see is for people who like to place the google ads with links to affiliate sites like clickbank products. Will google now pick only the main source, or one particular advertiers advert?
They also make a point to say do not produce “scraper” adsense sites, I presume because they will be banning these and quite possible the adwords / adsense account that goes with them? This is probably extreme, but it will help them filter results.
This all ties in to them merging the adwords / adsense / media / google bots together so that all the data can be used to effectively rank and site and weed out the spam.
This smells like problems to me. Here is what google have to say..
“We’ve also added some language to anticipate Google’s retrieval of advertiser landing pages. To further improve program quality, our system will soon visit and evaluate all landing pages specified in AdWords ads. The quality information collected will affect AdWords account performance in the future. If a landing page has informative content related to its AdWords ads and keywords, these keywords will receive higher Quality Scores and potentially lower minimum cost-per-click bid (CPC bid) requirements. Poor quality landing pages or those that restrict visits by our system are likely to experience a decrease in quality scores (and a potential increase in CPC bid requirements).”
And their bit about scraper sites:
“Additionally, due to Google’s progress in making an AdWords API available, we’re asking users not to “screenscrape” AdWords web pages. We believe screenscraping may negatively affect the performance of AdWords and that more efficient results can be obtained using the AdWords API.”
So, do you think this will be an issue? What are your feelings? Leave a comment or talk about it over in the forums.
