With the recent upheaval in the Google AdWords market, some marketers have been scurrying to make sense out of it all and get things as back to normal as possible. With changing the landing page algorithm, Google (GOOG) has caused some marketers that were paying only between five and ten cents a click, to now have successful bids starting at 50 cents and more.
In other words, advertising costs have gone up by ten to twenty times 
what it had been. Others found that their positions on the first page of the engine had now been moved to 3 or 4 pages deeper in the results. Some didn't even survive the change.
The main thing to keep in mind with all of this is that not all web pages were affected.
The ones that had the biggest changes were these:
AdSense sites (primarily arbitrage)
Single page sales letter sites
Email address gathering sites (squeeze pages)
Affiliate sites
This shouldn't be a surprise
Those that were completely surprised by this shouldn't have been. Google has been talking about this for awhile. Here's a guideline page they offer to help to optimize in a way they want.
What has changed is that along with examining your ads and keywords, they are now taking into consideration the landing pages you have as part of their "quality score."
Here's what they announced on their blog:
"Today, we started incorporating a new factor into the Quality Score -- the landing page -- which will look at the content and layout of the pages linked from your ads.
"Why are we doing this? Simply stated, we always aim to improve our users' experience so that these users (your potential customers) will continue to trust and value AdWords ads. Have you ever searched on a keyword, found an ad that seemed to be exactly what you wanted, and then clicked on it only to find a site that had little to do with what you were searching for? It's not a great experience."
Next post: What Google wants.
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