In December Google announced that they would be using a new spider (AdsBot) to crawl the landing pages advertisers send traffic to through their Google AdWords account. The general idea is that Google will look at landing page as yet another factor in their ad serving algorithm (quality score).

Since it was announced in December, I figured Google was already looking at advertisers landing pages; but a new alert is appearing in advertisers Google accounts that asks them to accept new terms and condition. In the new terms and conditions was mention of the use of landing pages in the quality score of AdWords ads.

So what does this all mean to you as an AdWords advertiser?

It is now more important than ever to create targeted landing pages on your website that reflect the keywords you are bidding on. This is certainly something that the most successful PPC practitioners have been doing for years, but now they will actually get rewarded for doing it by Google (not just rewarded with higher conversion).

You do have the option to disallow the AdsBot from spidering your landing pages, but if you do you will get a lower quality score, meaning less exposure on AdWords.

If you are currently sending all of your AdWords traffic to one or two landing pages, and those landing pages dont appear to be relevant to your keywords, be prepared to take a hit on your quality score. Ouch. This long weekend may be a good time to start strategizing on how you can create keyword appropriate landing pages for your AdWords accounts.

If you are looking for some light reading on AdsBot and how all if this is going to work, here are some helpful links:

Information on the change from Google AdWords Help Center
Danny Sullivans blog post about the change
The SEW Forum Discussion about the change

Have a great Memorial Day weekend!