Has anyone else seen the method of implemetation of Google's Quality score actually doing the reverse of what it intended - ie penalising the better more relevant sites and rewarding more dubious sites? It seems that all those checking the quality of a landing page are based in the US - but US business is different in many areas to that of say UK or Europe and this in some market sectors is leading to absurd results. Yet Google is supposed to be a global business....? To ellaborate, in one UK market those websites least affected by the new quailty score are those that 'pretend' to be another company (slightly deceiving the user) or who give insufficient and misleading information on their websites. It appears this has come about because of a complete lack of understanding of this industry in the UK. This is very worrying because what do those businesses with the most legitimate websites do? Watch whilst those with less ethical tactics benefit? Copy less ethical or misleading tactics? Ideally they should be able to talk this through with the quality 'policy advisors' - but Google currently do not allow this. I support the idea of removing or penalising many of the MFA websites as these are a nuisance. But creating a situation as described above is absurd. This is the fisrt time I have found AdWords to be so inflexible and fail to act quickly when doing so would benefit the AdWords users. As a PPC manager I'm now stuck with telling clients that in order to meet AdWords quality guidelines the website must be changed to be either less useful or misleading to users. I'm writing this in the hope that someone in AdWords takes note and allows some kind of communication with the quaility reviewers.
I have studied and concluded that the new Quality landing Score is a bogus policy. I was hit pretty hard by this and studied the results that now come up for the vast majority of the keywords I used to get traffic from. Now there are just MFA sites. Check out my article on the Google Adwords Quality Landing Page Score.
Clearly it is bogus because it impacted your sites in a negative manner. Seems to be a common thread among almost everyone claiming it is bogus.
I have a variety of sites and the ones that are the old, highest quality and most unique are fairing well. The ones that I put together quickly that need improvements in a number of ways got clobbered. It looks like Google's way of encouraging me to upgrade those sites.
I use AdWords for a site that uses AdSense but because the content is pretty good and I use landing pages relevant to the keywords I haven't seen any difference in the bids. I think in the long-term it's a good addition to the quality score and will help to improve the relevance of results.
Very strange, my sites I've put up recently are faring excellent, as well as my older sites. I haven't been hit by the issues at all. Even my hastily stuck together landing pages are doing well. As far as I'm concerned, this update hasn't affected me at all.
Heres why it is bogus. I too had many landing pages go to 5 and 10 dollars that were profitable. A few I moved to a free server so the url changed and they went thru and I actually was able to lower many of my bids. Nothing changed but the url. A couple others all I did was post a 300 x 720 display ad on a page with no other content at a free server and these too went thru OK. Funny, huh? CJ
It looks like the algorithm analyzes the site reputation and links. Sometimes, it can go overboard with that, I guess.
The problem with quality score occurs when rules that are sensible for one market are applied to different markets. They then become absurd. If you want to buy widets, info on widget and their price is important. Anyone can buy widgets, provided you can pay for them and it does not depend on other factors such as age, where you live, if you own a car etc. What if you want a service? Services are customised and best ones will depend on the website visitor. Seems AdWords is hitting these sites hard. The message: they understand products but not a service?? If I want an online car insurance quote which is best: a) arrive at one website, fill in one form and let the car insurance broker do the work of sifting through insurers (many only deal with brokers). b) have a list of insurance companies I can and cannot contact, leaving me to do a huge amount of work. Current quality score promotes b) at expense of a). I'd prefer a).
No basis on reputation or links, the majority of campaigns I run are on orphaned pages and I'm getting great prices.