Google Adsense Updating Quality Ranking Algorithm

Google's AdWords blog announced yesterday that the Adwords is planning some updates to the algorithim that focuses on the quality score of landing pages.  According to the product marketing manager for Ads Quality initiatives there are two parts to this upcoming update that affect the judgement of quality and also the ad content network.

"First, we'll begin incorporating landing page quality into the Quality Score for your contextually-targeted ads, using the same evaluation process as we do for ads showing on Google.com and the search network. Advertisers who may be providing a poor experience on their site will notice that their traffic across the content network decreases as a result of this change. Second, we're improving our algorithm for evaluating landing page quality and incorporating landing page content retrieved by the AdWords system."

There are a few questions answered in this blog post, but there are a few things that stand out:

• Google is encouraging marketers to focus on building landing pages that are best for their users, whether they come from AdWords or other sources.
• Since there is no minimum bid requirement for contextually-targeted ads, low quality landing pages will result in the need to bid higher to compete in the auction, which could also impact your position on pages in the contextual ads network.

A lot of big retail advertisers who have gone from pouring a ton of money into Google Adwords to bring in the traffic, thanks to recognizing that a lot of that traffic is really unqualified and coming through the ad network - turn the ad network off because it drains their budgets.  If the same algorithm is going to be applied to the network, that's good news for advertisers, but I think major advertisers are still going to be skeptical.  The Adsense network is more apt to fraud and advertisers know it.