Google's new landing page algorithm causing $10 minimum bids on thousands of sites!

[heybert00]

Google has started running their landing page algorithm and it is slamming pages that they believe are Made For Adsense (MFA) or are of little value to people searching for them. On the official Google forum, they state that this was started about 4 days ago. This would explain why many of your keywords have jumped to 5 or 10 dollars to activate. They are trying to weed out scrapers and sites that offer very little content and are just trying to get viewers to click on the ads on any given page. Google is going to lose a bunch of money over this but they are trying to clean up their search results.


Here is the link to this page: adwords.blogspot.com/2006/07/landing-page-quality-update.html

[ewan]

Some legit landing pages have also been affected, even people from this forum have felt it.

[heybert00]

I know, I have been feeling it too.

[rewlie]

That's a good news for legit publisher, bad news for scrapers.

[vlad7]

I haven't noticed anything yet. no min. bid increase so far.

[dirtdog1960theone]

Has google provided any examples? Just scanned the blog post, thanks. I always get interested in adwords and then google changes something...

[linkpro]

Its absolutely killing adwords.....

I am quitting for now and going to Overture and MSN -

[H20]

My average CPC increased 20% from yesterday to today. My average position dropped significally.

This adwords update is gonna cost me a few thousand dollars per month

I only hope my competitors hurts more.

[Cool1g]

interesting - i think this is the reason i've seen my adsense income increase in the last couple of days.

[seoindiaweb]

Rather my CPC has gone down and no change in rankings.. it hasnt yet affected my results

[Old Welsh Guy]

Who DO Google think they are?

[mad4]

Well, I just logged into my account and there is no change. In fact I have been able to reduce all my bids from 30p to 20p over the last week or two.

Google can charge what they like as long as they can still find people to advertise. Its all about ROI. In the mobile phone market I could spend £500 per day on PPC if I wanted to compete with the big players.

[H20]

I guess the only solution is to give the google ad bot the page it wants.
I will rewrite some of my landingpages today. Adding dynamic titles and meta-data based on the search query. Adding more keyword rich text at the bottom of the page.

*Sigh* And I started doing PPC to get away from SEO!

[daboss]

Originally Posted by Old Welsh Guy

Who DO Google think they are?

the current search engine king?

as long as they are there, they can do as they wish...

[kevingibbons]

Originally Posted by H20

*Sigh* And I started doing PPC to get away from SEO!

Lol, good luck optimising all those landing pages

[ScottBannon]

Wow, 5 of my campaigns haven't changed at all and 3 others have actually gone lower for me.

Then again, I've always used narrow, focused landing pages for specific keywords so I guess I'm ahead of the new required curve?

It just makes sense to me though, if you do a better job of targetting your keywords and landing pages you'll get a higher conversion rate.

[T0PS3O]

When exactly did this kick in? (So I can do some pre and post analysis...)

[bigdealio]

Amazing. I hate how Google eggheads think they can automate everything. Well - they can't. #2 their insistance on automating everything very often produces horrible results. I hope this will bite them in the bottomline very soon and they will clean up their line.

[heybert00]

The blog was posted on 7/7 and stated that it would be rolling out over the next several days.

adwords.blogspot.com/2006/07/landing-page-quality-update.html

sorry but you will need to copy and paste this. I do not have link-posting access yet. Maybe someone who does can post the link to make it easy.

[lorien1973]

about time they did something. crap sites polluting the paid results has gotten infuriating lately.