Thursday, May 21, 2009

"Keyword relevance" isn't based on relevance

My Jobs for Teens page, http://JobsForTeens.BestCareerLinks.com ranks the following Quality Score in Adwords: Poor (4/10)







"Jobs for Teens" is on my page 3 times, the phrase is in the Content Meta words, it's part of the URL, and "jobs" and "teens" are mentioned many more times on the page. The topic of the page is how to find jobs for teens. "Jobs for teens" is in an H1 header, and an H4 header.

Now someone please tell me how my page only ranks a 4/10 in relevance for the phrase "jobs for teens". My theory is that "jobs for teens" is a very popular search term and since google wants to charge .40 min bid for the ad to show up on the first page of search results (as opposed to the .5 or .10 that they used to charge before the company hit hard times and their stock dropped) that's why the min bid is so high.

And let's not forget that keywords that don't pay enough for listing on the first page of results rarely, if ever, cause ads to show up in ANY results.

Thursday, May 7, 2009

Min first page bid dance

One day "min bid for first page" is .40 so I up bid to .40 (getting no impressions at all with .2 bid). Next day 'min first page bid' is now .5, but I'm getting hits out the wazzo (and result shows up on first page). Google gives my landing page a rank of 3, but Adwords still lists it as "poor"

Looks like the bid prices are still driven by Google's profit margins.