Undoubtedly in response to numerous questions from concerned and confused Google Adwords advertisers, Google has posted an explanation of its Quality Score changes on its Adwords blog.

In short, here are Google’s responses to the main three issues on advertisers’ minds:

1. How will Quality Score be calculated?

Google will STILL consider (a) the historic performance of you account, evaluating the clickthrough rate (CTR) of all the ads and keywords in that account; and (b) your landing page quality. However, although Google will evaluate your overall Quality Score at the time of each search query, it will evaluate landing page quality less frequently.

2. What’s the impact of the removal of ‘Inactive for Search Status’?

Google believes that by making all keywords active it will better be able to evaluate keywords for any query where they may be relevant. The company has acknowledged that keywords previously marked as ‘inactive for search’ would otherwise never show ads on Google.com, even where they might have been a high quality match for certain queries. Now it’s giving such keywords a chance.

3. What’s the difference between ‘first page bid estimates’ and the old ‘minimum bids’?

Google says that for queries that don’t have much advertiser competition, the first page bid estimate should be relatively close to your existing minimum bid. However, queries with lots of advertiser competition may have much higher first page bid estimates. This is because you’ll probably need to bid above the old minimum bid to rank higher than the competition and show on the first page of paid search results.

Source: Trevor Claiborne, “Quality Score improvements to go live in coming days”, Inside Adwords, September 15, 2008

Interesting article by Patrick Altoft - he reckons Google may have reduced the weighting it gives to anchor text in its search engine algorithm.

Anchor text is the text that appears in website links. In other words, instead of simply displaying the URL of a given website, you might provide some descriptive text - this is known as anchor text. As an example, “http://www.kikabink.com/news/” is the straight URL of the home page of Kikabink News. But if I wanted this link to appear as “Internet marketing newsletter” I would write “Internet marketing newsletter” as the descriptive or anchor text.

According to Mr Altoft, anchor text is the “biggest flaw” in the Google algorithm. He believes that anchor text has no relation to trust for most queries.

“Just because a site has 5 million links with the anchor text ‘loans’ doesn’t mean its a good search result for the query ‘loans’. Currently there are two types of sites ranking for commercial queries - ones that rank due to the TrustRank of their incoming links (links from newspaper websites and quality blogs) and ones that rank because they have thousands of paid links with keywords in the anchor text.”

At this stage, the under-weighting of anchor text is just a theory… but certainly an interesting, and possibly valid, one.

Source: Patrick Altoft , “Google Changes Algorithm - Anchor Text Less Important”, BlogStorm, August 22, 2008

Last week the Search Engine Roundtable published the transcript from a panel of search engine marketing experts. Up for discussion were some little known truths about pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

Three (3) such truths are:

1. The long-tail is NOT never-ending. Search is becoming more navigational, with more search engine users typing in brand and trademark queries than obscure search phrases.
2. Search engine marketing is not about doing hundreds of different things… like most endeavors, success comes from doing a few things really well.
3. Advertising in the search engines may NOT always be best - for example, advertising in the content networks may be preferable for new products for which there are no or few searches.

Source: Search Engine Roundtable, “5 Things No One Will Tell You About SEM”, Search Engine Roundtable, August 19, 2008

Amit Singhal, Google Fellow in charge of the ranking team at Google, has just issued a blog post explaining Google’s approach to ranking sites in its organic or natural search engine listings.

The three principles underpinning its approach are:

1. Best locally relevant results served globally.
2. Keep it simple.
3. No manual intervention.

According to Mr Singhal, the first principle is that every user query should generate the most relevant results. The second principle is that despite the temptation to let complexity creep into the system, Google should strive to keep its system simple without compromising on the quality of results.

The third principle is that the final ordering of the results should be decided by algorithms using the contributions of the greater Internet community, not manually by Google. Google also believes that any need to manually adjust results is symptomatic of a greater need to improve its algorithm, and that if improving the algorithm improves one query, it will also improve an entire class of queries. The only scope for manual intervention relates to sites that violate Google’s policies (i.e. policies relating to such matters as legal compliance).

Not sure that Amit’s post adds much to our general understanding of how Google’s algorithm works… but he has left a carrot dangling: he has promised to explain the technologies behind Google’s ranking, and give examples of several state-of-the-art ranking techniques in action, in a later post.

We’ll keep you posted right here in Kikabink News.

Source: Amit Singhal, “Introduction to Google Ranking”, Google Blog, July 9, 2008