credit: Mark Strozier

It has now been a while since the new landing page assessments have been rolled out on Google. How have they affected you?

Compare two directory sites, both show Google Ads and buy Google Ads:

SourceTool.com & Business.com

Which has a better landing page? One clearly has more content. Next let’s look at the search results from the two sites:

SourceTool.com – Green Construction

Ten excerpts from business specific pages that have been added to the directory. Eight ads top and right side of page. The links lead to more robust business listings of the excepts.

Business.com – Green Construction

Business.com serves up Google Ads (16 sponsored listings top, right and bottom of page) and PAID listings. There are no nofollows on the paid links; they go straight to the business site.

The Breakdown

SourceTool provides a value add and full listing for companies supported by advertising. Business.com provides paid links that openly flaunt Google paid link policy. Clearly both businesses make money from click arbitrage.

SourceTool had their minimum bids for Adword raised from $0.06 minimum bid to $1. They spent more than $100k implementing changes recommended by Google to no avail.

Business.com is on of Google’s “Search Partners,” maybe that is why they don’t have to nofollow paid links. So, they get to sell on both ends with no barriers.

In response Dan Savage of SourceTool has flied complaint with the Justice Department. an excerpt from the New York Times:

The ways Sourcetool differs from business.com are what Mr. Savage views as his competitive advantages. They include the way he ranks companies, and a directory page that gives information about each company.

When I pressed Mr. Fox [Google’s product manager for ad quality] about Sourcetool, he refused to tell me why the algorithm had problems with the site. When I asked him why the business.com site was in the algorithm’s good graces but Sourcetool’s wasn’t, he wouldn’t tell me that, either. All I got were platitudes about the user experience. It wasn’t long before I was almost as exasperated as Mr. Savage. How can you adapt your business model to Google’s specs if Google won’t tell you what the specs are?

Google also told me that it never made judgments of what was “good” and “bad” because it was all in the hands of the algorithm. But that turns out not to be completely true. Mr. Savage shared with me an e-mail message from a Google account executive to someone at another company who had run into the same kind of landing page problem as Sourcetool. The Google account executive wrote back to say that she had looked at the site and found that “there seems to be a wealth of valuable information on the site.” Consequently, her team overruled the algorithm.

I think the bolded sections are important for everyone to read. Mr. Savage from SourceTool was spending over $500,000 per month on AdWords when his minimum bids skyrocketed. Clearly he has introduced even more content to his site that makes it surpass, by objective standards, the content on a site that receives special treatment from Google. I suggested a while ago that “Landing Page Quality” is a straw horse for Google. Obviously under different circumstances Mr. Savages money was as good as anyone else’s, and in fact his history must have been exemplary if they were getting $0.06 minimum bids on a wide range of topics.

Google AdWords has been largely obtuse in its handling of anything customer related, including making contact information very difficult to obtain for small time users. It is unclear what advantages, if any, the new landing page standards have accomplished for users. However, it is very clear what it has accomplished for Google; price gouging that helps protect Search Partners.

I invite you to take a close look at the effects the new standards have had on your campaigns.