Quality Score and mypage?pagetheme=niche

I've often wondered how Google scores pages where variables passed in the url are merged into the landing page like this:

mypage.com/index.php?pagetheme=dog%20food for keyword dog food
mypage.com/index.php?pagetheme=dog%20training for keyword dog training

Then you have Title, H1 and body copy with pagetheme echoed.

Does Google send a bot to mypage.com/index.php to determine the landing page quality score without the variables or would it treat each url+variable combo as unique?

My thinking is that Google may rationalise that they want genuine pages where affiliates are not trying to manipulate content with merged variables and so go for the variable free url for quality score purposes.

What does the panel think?

Thanks,

Jon

 

Google looks at urls. Different url = different page.

 

Google visits your page with the variables and will see it in its dynamically built form - with one notable exception. If you use dynamic keyword insertion in the url this will be omitted when the adwords bot visits your page.

For your example if you write your url as follows:

mypage.com/index.php?pagetheme={keyword}

the adwords bot will visit:

mypage.com/index.php?pagetheme=

as opposed to this which is what you would probably want:

mypage.com/index.php?pagetheme=dog%20food

 

So we have two different answers it seems.

GuyFromChicago, do you mean by different url that the variables are considered too, thus contradicting alhermette?

alhermette, may I ask how you know that the Adwords bot will omit the dynamic keyword insertion variables?

 

I'm pretty sure we're both saying the same thing, alhermette just took it a step further and pointed out the exception.

 

How would this affect quality score then?

Presumably the QS for the landing page wouldn't be so great for each keyword in the ad group if the adwords bot cant find the dynamic keywords on the page, but on the other hand the conversion rate I imagine would increase???

 

I see where the confusion is now. My example was not talking about dynamic keyword insertion (aka {my keyword}), but having hard coded keyword variables.

GuyFromChicago , if you have hard coded variables as in my example, are you saying that they treat my two example links as two distinct pages? Was that from tests you have done? If so, why would they be treated differently from {keyword} type variables. Surely a variable is a variable right?

 

Yes, that is my understanding.

 

You have to look in your weblogs to see exactly what query string the bot is using when it visits your page. {keyword} is omitted. Hard coded variables have always been used as far as I can tell.