Google is playing with fire with their current “Quality Score” nonsense. They are pissing off large and legitimate publishers who want to enter the adwords market by grossly discriminating based on a some secret formula. Their lack of transparency will lead to claims that the discrimination is based on factors other than their “trust us, it’s fair” method. My crystal ball says that this will end badly and result in several lawsuits and even more unsatisfied former clients.
But it doesn’t have to end that way. If what they really want to do is stop adsense arbitrage, rumination has come up with a rather elegant solution:
Here’s what I mean (in my kind of psuedo code): Add these lines to the application.
if search.click == adwords.ad
and destination.adwords.ad == adsense.units
show.adsense.psa_ads
else exit()The effect of those simple lines of code would be that any webmaster who bid on adwords phrases would only have Public Service Ads shown on their adsense ready destination website.
While there might still be some ways to circumvent this solution (like redirects), it looks like a way to get away from this silly “quality score” stigma that will open the doors for other PPC engines.
Their other option is of course to come clean and show us EXACTLY how quality score is calculated. Because right now, it feels like Google is trying to pull the wool over our eyes so they can pick our pockets.
