AdsBot-Google : Google’s New Crawler for Adwords

Came across an interesting article while going through the weekly newsletter from Axandra. It talks about Google’s new spider and its implications to your adwords ads and webpages. I’ll follow it up with some commentary on keyword arbitrage. Checkout …

Google is using a new crawler software program for their AdWords advertising system that automatically spiders and analyzes the content of advertising landing pages. The name of the new crawler is AdsBot-Google. If you see such an entry in your web logs then your web site been visited by the new bot.

How Will This Affect Your Adwords Ads?

Google tries to determine the quality of the ad landing pages with the new bot. The content of the landing page will be used for the Quality Score that Google assigns to your ads.

Google uses the Quality Score and the amount you are willing to pay to determine the position of your ads. Ads with a high quality score can rank higher even if you pay less than others for the ad.

If you don’t allow Google’s new spider to index your web pages, then your AdWords quality score will go down. Google has an official statement on its AdWords pages:

“While you can exclude your site from review, this will provide us with little information about your landing page’s quality and relevance. Therefore, if you restrict AdWords from visiting your landing pages, you will experience a drop in Quality Scores for your related keywords.

(This will cause higher minimum bid requirements for any landing page for which you’ve restricted access.)”

What does this mean to your organic search engine rankings?

If you use cloaking on your web site and if you advertise your web site on Google AdWords then Google now has another way to find out that you’re cloaking. Your landing pages should be relevant to the search term that you target in your AdWords ads, so as to improve your score. (and pay less !)

Your landing pages should be related to your ads and they should convince your web site visitors to buy something on your web site. Good landing pages work with PPC ads as well as with organic search engine listings.

Commentary : What is also to be considered is the implication on your webpages if you are using Google Adsense on your landing pages. How would that affect the Quality score?

In a way, the landing page is infact selling something, and that sale is a ‘higher valued ad’ but would it be ethical to do such a thing? On one side, we have a group which says Ad-arbitrage is completely legal as you are not tricking the SE’s. While on the other side we have people saying that though Legal, the practice is Unethical !

Well, its a long debate and we have advocates on both sides vouching for how correct they are. An answer can only be reached when Google decides what to do with such sites ! Now, with their new bot they sure can locate such webpages.

Here’s an interesting read for you guys : Crazy AdSense Experiment: Unethical But Legal $10,000/Month - Trivia - Did you know that 80%(!) of ads on insurance are MFA (Made for AdSense)? Recently we collected the database of over 40,000,000 search phrases. From 30% to 90%(!) of ads on Google for the top 1,000 most expensive keywords are MFA… !

[tags]Google adwords, Google AdSense, googlebot, adsbot-google, ad-arbitrage [/tags]