Google Quality Score Update – Will We Feel It?

November 7th, 2008

Probably not.

This week, Google announced a couple of changes to the algorithm of their magical quality score.

  1. Position Normalizers – You know that saying, “The rich get richer?” Well, Google, right before withdrawing from their deal to form an advertising partnership with rival Yahoo! and from being subjected to the scrutiny of the anti-trust system, wanted to combat this aphorism by removing the ad position biases because of CTR. What does this mean? Ads in higher positions typically have high click-through rates because they have high positions and have high positions because they have high click-through rates. Google wants to remove the circular reasoning behind this and award truly high quality ads with distinguished positioning.
  2. Top Ad Placements – This one is confusing. According to Google, ads get placed according to their ad rank. It’s possible that the highest ad rank has a low quality score, which disqualifies the ad from the top of the page (yellow slots), which in turn, causes there to be no ads at all in this slot. OK? Take it as it is. The bottom line is that Google now allows ads with a lower ad rank and higher quality score to jump to the top spot. Got it? Cool.

For the full spiel on what Google portends are the guidelines for running higher quality search and content campaigns with added efficiency, check out their answer page to: What is ‘quality score’ and how is it calculated?

Posted in Search Marketing by Peter Figueredo | | 0 Comments

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