The title kinda sounds like something from an old 1940's monster movie, where the big ugly futuristic robot crawls out of it's dark hole to terrorize the common advertiser with blinking lights and mechanic tendrals of quality score readers. Thankfully, this robot is really not that scary, Google instead is again improving some things they are doing with Adwords. There is an excellent thread on this subject at SEW Forums, and Danny S. and other member go into more detail. To recap, Google has been busy with Adwords this year, everything from a new layout, talks about quality changes, and finally back in December discussion about the Quality Score including the landing page as part of it influencing the adwords position on the page.
According to Google, the new changes will be:
We've also added some language to anticipate Google's retrieval of advertiser landing pages. To further improve program quality, our system will soon visit and evaluate all landing pages specified in AdWords ads. The quality information collected will affect AdWords account performance in the future. If a landing page has informative content related to its AdWords ads and keywords, these keywords will receive higher Quality Scores and potentially lower minimum cost-per-click bid (CPC bid) requirements. Poor quality landing pages or those that restrict visits by our system are likely to experience a decrease in quality scores (and a potential increase in CPC bid requirements).
Interestingly, this line is also included about screenscraping affecting quality scores:
Additionally, due to Google's progress in making an AdWords API available, we're asking users not to "screenscrape" AdWords web pages. We believe screenscraping may negatively affect the performance of AdWords and that more efficient results can be obtained using the AdWords API.
It seems some of the members are not thrilled about the changes. Many are pointing to bigger problems like quality issues with the content networks and click fraud should be better priorities. However, some are thrilled at the response from Google and I have to agree. This will improve things for advertisers who are using Adwords genuinely.
One last point, Danny mentions that you can opt-out of getting crawled:
Basically, they were getting some of the landing pages through other crawling but now will get all of them through a dedicated spider. You can opt-out -- but if you do, your quality score will suffer.
Continued discussion at SearchEngineWatch Forums plus Danny has a nice write up at SEW Blog.
