Google continues its march toward being the ultimate search engine in terms of relevancy and quality, and if you aren't paying attention and keeping up with their changes, you're going to be left in the dust, with ineffective campaigns and hefty minimum bid prices.
This is just another move in the latest flurry of changes Google is making to weed out the "scrapers" and arbitragers. You'll find the following in the Google Quality Score Section:
* Link to the page on your site that provides the most useful and accurate information about the product or service in your ad.
* Ensure that your landing page is relevant to your keywords and your ad text.
* Distinguish sponsored links from the rest of your site content.
* Try to provide information without requiring users to register. Or, provide a preview of what users will get by registering.
* In general, build pages that provide substantial and useful information to the end-user. If your ad does link to a page consisting of mostly ads or general search results (such as a directory or catalog page), provide additional information beyond what the user may have seen in your ad or on the page prior to clicking on your ad.
* You should have unique content (should not be similar or nearly identical in appearance to another site). For more information, see our affiliate guidelines.
You have to love how clear Google is with this. If your sites aren't meeting these requirements, expect your Quality and Relevancy scores to plummet. You have to be providing good content to your users and you need to make sure their experience with your site is logical and helpful. Sure, this may mean you need to do some tweaking or make some outright improvements to your sites, but the end result is that Google remains the search engine people trust and expect to deliver them quality results. And your end result is that people will click through to where you want them to be and hit that "buy now" button more often.
About the Author
Kevin Dahl is a software developer with 20+ yrs experience developing Windows software. You can visit his sites at http://www.pdf4u.com and http://www.affiliate-marketing-advantage.com
