Heads up
Google are going to make two changes:
1. “….incorporating landing page quality into the Quality Score for your contextually-targeted ads, using the same evaluation process as we do for search. Advertisers who may be providing a poor experience on their site will notice that their traffic across the content network decreases as a result of this change”
2. “..Second, we’re improving our algorithm for evaluating landing page quality and incorporating landing page content retrieved by the AdWords system”.
What do they consider to be a high quality landing page?
“…we don’t provide more specific recommendations because there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to best create landing pages. We therefore encourage you to focus on building landing pages that are best for your users…”
Whatever that is.
What if users really, really want to click on more contextual ads? My guess is that is they very thing Google is trying to prevent.
Google suggest the following:
-Link to the page on your site that provides the most useful and accurate information about the product or service in your ad.
-If your site displays advertising, distinguish sponsored links from the rest of your site content.
-Try to provide information without requiring users to register. Or, provide a preview of what users will get by registering.
-In general, build pages that provide substantial and useful information to the end-user. If your landing page consists of mostly ads or general search results (such as a directory or catalog page), you should provide as much information as you can beyond what your ad describes. For example, if your ad mentions <'Free travel information,' your landing page should feature free travel information (versus links to other sites that do).
-You should have unique content (should not be similar or nearly identical in appearance to another site).
More here:
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2006/11/...ty-update.html