SEO Expert, Anthony Yap

For those businesses running pay-per-click advertising campaigns on Google, you’ll want to improve the quality of your landing pages. Ad landing pages will be automatically spidered by a new AdsBot which assesses the quality of an ad campaign by the content of landing pages. This quality score coupled with the bid price and clickthrough rate is used to determine AdRank, the actual position where an ad will appear in the search results.

You may choose to exclude landing page spidering by the new AdsBot but it will hurt your final Quality Score.

We believe that a non-participating advertiser does detract from the user’s search experience, and from the overall quality of the AdWords program. 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 is slightly different from the announcement made earlier about the spidering of landing pages for quality score determination. If neither the AdSense MediaPartners Bot or regular Googlebot spider the page or was blocked from spidering by these bots, then AdWords wouldn’t be able to assess the page.

New statistics from Nielsen NetRatings show Google handles half of the web searches in the United States.

From the top 5 shopping search terms displayed, it shows that an online presence drives offline buying behavior. Searchers appear to browse online before visiting these stores in their neighborhood.

For a more complete perspective of results attributed to each search engine over time, check out Search Engine Watch pages for Nielsen NetRatings and comScore Media Metrix.

According to the E-consultancy Search Marketing Buyer’s Guide for 2006, the U.K. market for search engine marketing will be worth an estimated £1.41 billion ($2.6 billion) by the end of 2006 with paid search amounting to more than 90% of the total (US$2.4 billion). SEO will be worth US$276 million by the end of 2006.