For example if a searcher was looking to buy a “video game controller”, clicked through an AdWords link and landed on an advertiser’s page that focused on computer monitors, the relevance is fairly low and thus from a searcher’s perspective, the experience might be considered poor when using AdWords. If an AdWords advertiser does not provide a focused landing page, the advertiser will likely end up spending more of their advertising budget on key phrases if the content is not deemed relevant by Google.

Overall, Google wants searchers to have a great experience when using AdWords and continue or increase a searchers use of Google and their AdWords listings. AdWords, if you’re not aware of it, is how Google monetizes their search traffic and is largely responsible for their $100B+ market capitalization.

From the Inside AdWords blog:

“…Advertisers who are providing robust and relevant content will see little change. However, for those who are providing a less positive user experience, the Quality Score may decrease and in turn increase the minimum bid required for the keyword to run…”

There is a guidelines section for building landing pages on Google which gives advice that one might use even for normal web page building:

“…Ensure that your landing page is relevant to your keywords and your ad text…In general, build pages that provide substantial and useful information to the end-user. If your ad does link to a page consisting of mostly ads or general search results (such as a directory or catalog page), provide additional information beyond what the user may have seen in your ad or on the page prior to clicking on your ad…”

How do you focus your AdWords campaign so that you are targeting the right group? Consider running a comprehensive analytics suite like WebTrends in order to track search engine referrals and the resulting behavior of the traffic being generated by your AdWords campaigns. Consider the behaviors that you will be measuring such as:

-Do those that click through your advertisement reach your landing page but then click away/back to Google?
-How far do these visitors continue on into your site?
-What percentage of AdWords related visitors convert into a purchase?

You can test several alternative landing pages over a short period of time and see exactly where you have the most success then further tweak your landing page as you gain an understanding of what content converts an AdWords click through into sale or win.

Learn more about web analytics and some of the considerations you might make by downloading the “Click Z Best of Web Analytics Guide“.

With the “Jagger” updates, some niche industries have reported a large number of sites affected. Why? While no one but Google knows all of the details for sure, we believe that many of these individual sites have directly or inadvertently taken part in artificial linking schemes (a major target of several updates, including the “Jagger” update).

We all know that inbound links (those that come from other sites and link to your own) play a large part in the rankings game. Some believe that when it comes to links, it is about the raw number of inbound links rather than the quality of the inbound links. Some link management/sales/broker companies work on this same assumption. If you ask them to increase the number of inbound links to a particular page or pages on your site, they’ll do just that. They will add links to your page on artificial directories, blogs, link lists , forums, web rings, or other places.

Because of this, there are many links that come from sites that pop up over night, that have little to no relevance to the site that they are linking to, or exhibit an artificial linking pattern. Google, like most engines, would rather not give credit or benefit to those that attempt to subvert their algorithm. In theory, why should a site with a 1,000 links from throw away sites that have little to no traffic or relevance count toward improving the rankings or “voting” for the popularity of another site? It would be like counting fake Canadian voter ballots for an election in the United States or vice versa. These votes don’t really exist as natural/real votes but even if they were real, they are not relevant to the election anyway. Why count them?

Along these same lines, we have also heard horror stories before and after “Jagger”, of small businesses that have experienced this same problem with “submission” companies. The dubious ones sell their services based on the common misconception that submitting alone and with frequency will get you to a top ranking. They may even tell you that they can get your pages indexed within so many hours or days of using their service. But they often take the same steps as the spammy link companies in propagating links to your site on their own network of irrelevant sites. Before “Jagger” this would mean that your site could rise to the top. Then once you stop using their service (and assuming that your site was not caught by a search engine algorithm or a competitor did not report you), they remove their links to you and boom, you start to believe that submission really is the main activity that can get your pages ranked.

While Google and other engines are not perfect, they are constantly evolving their algorithms to detect these link networks and removing any boost in rankings that sites may receive from the hundreds or thousands of irrelevant, un-natural inbound links. So, we are hopeful that research within the industry and at the search engines will mean that spammy link networks will play a less and less relevant role. As others in the industry have pointed out, aggressive SEO could be getting harder to employ as the search engines become savvier.

So, if you are taking part in any of these linking schemes, and the network is found and devalued, your site make take a hit in rankings.

Will there be higher, i.e. better, rankings for those that are not taking part in link brokering schemes or using shady submission companies? If you have well optimized pages, normal/relevant links gained over time, a well organized site… more than likely, yes. On the other hand, we don’t have a lot of control over who links to us or what information they may decide to take from our sites which … may even help or hinder us under certain conditions. So if these spammers, who take your content and link to your site are themselves devalued, you may loose some of the boost in rankings that they might have temporarily provided (whether you had wanted the boost or not).

What if you find this type of link spam site or network? You could ask Google to look into it as well as notify other engines that might be using these artificial links to bolster rankings.

What if you feel that you have unjustly lost rankings due to this update or has your site been completely removed? One Googler, Matt Cutts, recommends that you attempt to use a reinclusion request at
http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py. He even has a short guide to the process at:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/reinclusion-request-howto/

Before asking for a reinculsion though, we would highly recommend that you run a Google search for your site with both www. (as in “www.site.com”) and with out it (such as in “site.com”). If your site is not set up to force your address to display in one of these two ways, an engine can index your site in either way. As is normal after a major update like “Jagger”, it seems that this problem has caught some web masters unaware. As this is one of the more fixable issues, now is a perfect time to take control of how your site is listed.