Google's Landing Page Quality Change

Advertisers in a number of online forums have reported an increase in the costs of the AdWords they buy. One user said that his cost-per-click price rose 400 percent, while another reported an overnight increase of 2,000 percent, according to eWeek's Google Watch.

In a blog post last Friday Google announced changes in its search algorythm. According to the company, this will affect only a small number of advertisers - those "who are not providing useful landing pages to our users will have lower Quality Scores that in turn result in higher minimum bid requirements for their keywords."

"We realize that some minimum bids may be too high to be cost-effective," the post read. "Indeed, these high minimum bids are our way of motivating advertisers to either improve their landing pages or to simply stop using AdWords for those pages."

According to a report released by Perfomics in June, the average Cost per Keyword slid about 50 percent from a fourth quarter high of $59 to near $30 throughout the first quarter. Year-over-year, Cost per Keyword remains relatively unchanged.

A few advertisers in forums have reported that their AdWords expense has decreased since Google's change to the AdWords algorithms.

According to some advertisers, however, Google should not be allowed to enforce landing page quality. Web site owners, they say, are the best judge of whether their landing pages are useful for would-be consumers.

"They need to understand that there are literally dozens of different types of sites," read one post. "By that I mean, dozens of sites have many different purposes and to clump them all into one and do a huge [algorithm] sweep is asinine."