AdWords Landing Page Quality Score

Google assesses Landing Page Quality to determine whether your ads should be shown at a normal bid or a higher bid. Now, that assessment will affect your ad distribution even in the content network. Google is clarifying, for starters, that the Landing Page Quality portion of their assessment of overall Quality does not affect ad rank - just minimum bids. In other words, it doesn't govern the overall auction, it's more of a punitive measure that creates an on-off mechanism much as editorial policies did in the past. No one's getting a bonus for having a "really awesome landing page." How clear is that? Not really clear enough. Such explanations seem to come out as if they were obvious facts, months after they were implemented quietly or not fully explained. Translation: often, I feel dumb - yet somewhat vindicated in my earlier fumbling explanations, which were roughly accurate. If there is a possible interpretation of that, it goes something like this: a lot of arbitrage and affiliate type players were shut out of showing AdWords on Google Search on their first go-round. Although this is not official verbiage, I believe at least one Google staffer has referred to this as a "sweep". So the next place you'd see those ads showing up, as the "swept" began to react to the change, is in the contextual ad space. Not exactly a minor issue, because users are still going to be ticked at some of those old familiar ads designed only to send users to go click on more ads. Example: one place I see a lot of weird contextual ads is in GMail and in Google Groups. I have a junk GMail account I use to assess a bunch of autoresponded offers and marketing schlock. Some of that stuff is selling something, and sometimes that something is really junky. But none of it is selling anything of an adult nature. Yet some of the contextual ads that were sneaking in were pretty obscene. Oh, the words weren't obscene. But the meaning was. Personally, I don't care! But you get the feeling a lot of GMail users might care. So - the thinking at Google seems to be: we'll do anything to make sure that there are plenty of our ads showing up all over the web, in contextually relevant places. But we also want to make sure that they are niiice, respectable ads, with niiice, user-friendly landing pages. They won't say precisely what kinds of landing pages they're targeting as low quality. Instead, we get helpful hints like "Bookmark murdok: Andrew Henry is an Internet Marketing Consultant involved in teaching small businesses how to effectively market online. Current Information Websites include www.moneyandmotivation.com, and