Google quietly announced a modification to the Adwords quality scoring system last week, that could have far reaching implications for anyone using landing pages. The algorythm purportedly looks at the “relevance” of the landing page as part of the score. A more “on topic” landing page should facilitate higher PPC position, and lower costs per click. For more information see the Google Landing Page Guidelines

Does this mean we’ll soon see keyword stuffing and other nefarious tactics on PPC landing pages?? I don’t know, and I kind of doubt it would help anyways, but who really knows how sophisticated this algorytm is.

If you are running Urchin Analytics, Google could actually measure your conversion rate, and include it as part of the score! This is kind of scary, and another reason we’ll never recommend using Urchin to anyone. But then again, if you are actively testing and optimizing your landing page content for conversions, you’ll have a leg up on most of the competition.