The roll out of the new Google AdWords algorithm is supposed to be calculating the quality score of a landing page.
Many marketers are concerned about sensitive data that might be used by Google as an alternative or in addition to landing pages to somehow effect paid as well as natural rankings.
A post by Graywolf talks about just that. At a recent Las Vegas PubCon conference he approached Google’s Engineer Matt Cutts with this question and to no one’s surprise Matt did not provide a clear answer.
“When I spoke with Matt in Vegas I unashamedly admitted that I don’t want Google to have all of that user data, because I think they will “use it against me” to make things harder for me (not personally just sites in general). I know I’m in the minority thinking that Google is currently using user data in any meaningful way, and in true Matt Cutts form he neither confirmed or denied my suspicions”
I am not surprised that Matt avoided answering this question. Google has all that data so why wouldn’t they use it to better their results (organic and paid).
The main objective of a search engine is to make the USERS happy. If users are happy, they come back. The more they search, the more ad $ Google gets. As simple as that.
With my PPC campaigns I did notice major changes in the PAID section. Did not however see a major change in organic listings.
Paid became a lot more expensive even though I have dedicated landing pages for each keyword used. So if Google is visiting those pages and looking for keyword relevancy we’ve got it.
This bring us back to what Google has been preaching for years. . “Better your website for better results from Google and thus your visitors“. It’s just that now Google can/is enforcing it with their algorithm.
With time site managers will have to focus more on their own sites and less on the Google algorithm. And finally the war between “Tech SEOs” VS. “Marketers SEOs” will be won by Marketers!
P.S. No one should be surprised that Google is not confirming this information. Why would they? It’s the same thing as if they would reveal 50 of the 200 things their algorithm looks at when ranking a site. Google has massive amounts of data from the Toolbar, Adwords, Analytics, Search, etc they’d be dumb not to use it to better themselves.
We should not be crying about it. If we do, we become hypocrites. It’s OK for us to use the analytics data that we gather from our website visitors and thus change our site but it’s not OK for Google to use this data to better themselves?
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Igor Mordkovich is an in-house marketing director for a NYC based online company. He also writes a personal blog on search marketing and advertising.
Igor’s Blog: http://www.bizmord.com/Blog
