Quality Score Rant
Here’s my take on Quality Scores. I feel like ranting, if I’m wrong on anything send flames to /dev/null… or the comments 
The name sounds good right? Google must be looking out for the quality of their advertisements to make sure to make sure the Internet doesn’t become a pile of crap. With SEO spam they generally assume that big long standing sites produce quality information and should rank higher than a little guy who is more likely to be the one producing crap. This is a partly natural phenomenon anyway because big companies have the resources to allocate to SEO but I’d say it’s also enhanced Google’s algorithm. Spammers rank because it’s a product of the time investment learning Google’s algorithms, but there are a ton of small site owners who never rank anywhere.
Anyway Google quality score is a rip-off. The idea behind affiliate marketing is to use other people’s marketing budgets to promote your products and either delay taking a profit or take a drop in profit per sold item. Google know that these little guys don’t have a massive choice of where to buy traffic and they create above normal numbers of campaigns so they can add yet another premium on advertisements. Google quality score should be renamed Google’s hidden charges or Google’s extra dividend for shareholders as you have to ask why does it cost money for small advertiser’s to receive a good quality score.
Per campaign.
In essence they just jacked up the profit they make per ad because now you have to bid higher to raise your CTR so you can reduce your bid, as well as make extra pages on your site to make it look more useful. Wtf!?! If they were really interested in the quality of your ads they wouldn’t rank them based on your budget. We should check Google’s income statement before and after QS.
Or maybe I’m just pissed off because Google QS screws me up every time. Anyway,
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November 10th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Classic Selective term “Quality Score” - I agree it doesn’t always depend on quality, unless of course the quality they are referring too is in fact the Quality of company.googleexpenditure, I have never had a great problem with it but I do see the difference between a 10k buy and a 10£ buy, from both sides!
I suppose they wouldn’t be where they are without a little propaganda/psychology!
November 10th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
Glad to see your still there!
Yeah they have artificially created quite hight sink costs for new PPC campaigns…
What I am not clear on though is whther CTR is relitive to position… so, if you have agreat CTR for #10… whether they will, over time promote you through #9, 8, 7 etc.
TBH I dont go for top spots now… just take the longtail aproach on PPC as I do on seo… less painful.
November 11th, 2008 at 5:25 am
Yep, still here. Just can’t find something to post about every day like folks like John Chow do. Everything is a time sucker.
If I posted every day, every day would be a rant :D. Maybe I should just get a rant blog.
There’s a ton more to say on captcha but for reasons of time and not giving away all my best info it’s not really practical. You can do some crazy cool stuff with tesseract’s font database for sure.
Longtail does rule, especially if it also helps get more niche targeted visitors.
November 11th, 2008 at 9:14 am
Would not waste your time reading Chow if I were you… unless your looking for a master class in reader manipulation / snakeoil salesmanship.
November 11th, 2008 at 9:39 am
I randomly view a bunch of different blogs every once in a while. I don’t have a feed reader. Every now and again I see what’s happened in the world, so I wouldn’t really say I read John Chow. I have seen the odd post.
If I want real information I generally buy a book.
November 18th, 2008 at 5:08 am
Quality will always be a matter all the way. There is no compromise with it.
November 26th, 2008 at 7:19 am
From the very beginning it is all that google told us all. The quality. That is the secret of every thing.
November 27th, 2008 at 3:13 am
good luck
December 27th, 2008 at 1:27 am
Google is really in a mess for what we are doing for SEO and trying to control it so hardly.
January 5th, 2009 at 9:14 pm
Google doesn’t even understand quality scroe as far as I am concerned, it’s changes everytime you see a post about it, I try to ignore it now.