Google introduced the quality score algorithm a few years ago in order to give it more control over the prices AdWords advertisers paid for the clickthroughs to their websites. The first cost per click bidding system introduced by Overture nearly a decade ago allowed advertisers to bid against each other for position in the paid ad listings. Overture ad “auctions” were quite transparent, with Overture even publishing the bids paid by competitors for the same keyword. (Overture was later acquired by Yahoo).

When Google launched AdWords, it included the click through rate as a factor in cost per click. An advertiser whose ad was able to attract a 2 percent click through rate and who posted a bid of $0.51 would be shown ahead of another advertiser for that keyword bidding $1.00.click with a 1 percent click through on its ad.

Google’s system worked well for advertisers who were able to get high click through rates and worked very well for Google, which was able to get higher yields from the cost per click ads by avoiding displaying large volumes of ads with low click through rates. Unfortunately, the AdWords auction became opaque since Google did not publish the CTRs or the advertisers bids. Advertisers had to guess what their competitors might be paying.

The landing page and keyword quality algorithms introduced a whole host of new factors that Google claims were designed to improve the user experience by displaying the right kinds of ads and links to the right kinds of sites. The current system employs quality scores for each keyword. Google says:

“It looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user’s search query. A keyword’s Quality Score updates frequently and is closely related to its performance. In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC).”

The quality score is important because it directly affects the amount an advertiser must pay for a click through in relation to other advertises. For example, and advertiser with a keyword quality score of 1 might have to pay $20 per click through which a competitor with a quality score of 8 might only have to pay $2.00 for the same click through (quality scores range from 1 to 10 from poor to excellent)

We are always working to improve the quality scores of our clients’ AdWords campaigns. We use a very easy method of monitoring these scores. To do this, you will need AdWords Editor, Excel, and the ability to create a pivot table. Here’s the step by step process:

1) Open Adwords editor and update for any changes in the account.
2) Selecting the keywords tab, select all the row and paste in an Excel spreadsheet (if you have very large AdWords campaigns – more than 66,000 keywords – you will need Excel 2007 which allows up to one million rows and make sure your computer has lots of memory)
3) Create a pivot table (“Insert > Pivot Table”) and set the “Row Label” to quality score and the “Values” to “Count of Keywords”
4) Now you have created a Quality Score Distribution Table. Add another column which calculates the percentage for each quality score. Create a graph, date it, and compare your progress as you make changes to the landing page and ad text.

Ideally, 80 percent of your keywords should be quality scores of 7 or higher. In the case of highly competitive keywords, it’s extremely difficult to get higher than 8 since Google appears to take into the account the popularity of the keyword in AdWords auctions in setting the quality score. Keep track of all you experiments. As Dr. Arrowsmith learned from his mentor Max Gottleb, good scientists take great notes. Good luck.

TinyURL is a web page redirection service that substitutes short aliases for longer, presumably hard to remember urls. Created in 2002, it has been of limited use on the web and has occasionally been misused by affiliate or scam websites that wanted to get clickthroughs without showing their domain identify. [All domains can be tracked back to their owner through the domain registration system administered by VeriSign].

The explosive growth of Twitter has dramatically increased the visibility of the tinyurl service because Twitter, with its limit of 140 characters per posts, doesn’t want a lengthy url to take up too much of the limited space. Typically tweets now contains dozens of tiny urls as the user references followers back to expanded content, usually on a blog.

It has not gone noticed in the SEO community that Twitter back links can be valuable in helping a website increase its page reputation, especially with Google. It’s not uncommon to see Twitter links  appearing in the first page of results to “link://www.yoursite.com” Google searches, which displays the list of inbound links to your site. So many webmasters would like to use Twitter to help increase the reputation of their sites.

The rub is if the back link is in the form of a tiny url, you can pretty much forget about getting any page rank boost from the link. As a result of the spotty reputation of tiny urls in the past, Google devalues any tiny url back links.

Twitter doesn’t automatically rewrite all urls as tiny urls. We’ve tested shorter urls up to a length of 31 characters and found the original links preserved. At the same time, we have found links of 41 characters to be rewritten as tiny urls. We’ve also found that longer “non working” urls not to be rewritten, so they must be employing some kind of test to see if the page displays. It doesn’t not seem to matter how much content precedes the 31 character url, as long as it stays within the 140 character limit. We haven’t had the time to test this extensively, so we’d be interested in hearing what other Twitter rewrite testers have found.