On one of Digitalpoint’s forums, the new AdWords landing page quality score issue is being hotly debated. On this page, people are suggesting that the pricing policies used by Google AdWords may be illegal.

If you visit a shop to purchase something, you would not expect to be offered a price of £10 to buy a screwdriver that somebody else was able to purchase for 10p just because you look like a roughneck, yet this in effect is exactly what Google is doing in the digital domain. They’ve been doing this for some time, but the current situation with certain keywords attracting huge minimum bids has brought this issue into sharp relief.

It is illegal under certain circumstances to refuse to sell a product to a customer. However, Google is not refusing to sell a product. Google is, instead, quoting an uneconomical price for that product.

Google is refusing to give details of the system of quality scoring that they use, to prevent the system being manipulated by any other means than guesswork and experimentation. However, transparency in terms of pricing structure is simply not available, and this may fall foul of the law.

In a reply to somebody who was hit with a massive price hike in their minimum bid for certain keywords and logged a support request, it was confirmed that their landing page quality score had been adversely affected. When asked what they could do to improve their quality score, they were met with the following response:

“Unfortunately we cannot go into specifics about what changes you can make to get a better Quality Score other than to make sure that you are following the posted guidelines and that you consider the quality of search user’s experience when thinking about the advertising experience you are providing.”

David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer

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