Google Cracks Down on Arbitragers - Crash Victims
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Google instituted this change very quickly, which caught a lot of advertisers flat-footed. But it looks like Google tripped up more than just the MFA site owners it was trying to catch. Some of the problem may have to do with how Google determines what is relevant. Al Scillitani, search marketing manager at Fortune Interactive, wonders how well any bot can calculate a relevancy score. "If the bot does not recognize a synonym of your word or if it is taken out of context, will this affect your quality index score?"
It could be a real problem for those who have landing pages set up that include rich media such as Flash. If a search engine spider can't crawl the landing page, it can't deliver a valid score for the landing page. So those who create landing pages will have to take SEO a lot more seriously than they have up until now.
Some SEOs discussing these changes on the forums have said that Google's latest move will really hurt the small time advertisers. There are a lot of tricks to advertising in AdWords and making your ad stand out. The new algorithm makes it more likely that your ad will be deactivated due to low quality if you do not get everything just right. Since a small advertiser probably won't want to spend the time learning all the tricks (they're too busy working on the rest of their business), they're likely to stop advertising with Google.
So how do you avoid this problem? Google has posted guidelines pertaining to landing pages and site quality. Not surprisingly, the first guideline is "Provide relevant and substantial content." Perhaps it should have added "in an easy-to-crawl format." If you read through them, you'll see that most of the guidelines seem to be common sense. If these changes help get rid of MFA sites, a lot of people will benefit, from searchers to legitimate publishers who use AdSense to legitimate advertisers; but so far, the implementation leaves something to be desired. Let's hope this flight doesn't turn into a disaster movie for too many AdWords users.
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