adCenter Improves Ad Quality Ranking Algorithm

The adCenter blog announced that they have made improvements to the ranking algorithm to take into account several quality factors. The factors include:

• Assessing the content of the ad and landing page in relation to the user’s likely intent.
• Assessing the keywords that an advertiser selects in relation to the advertiser’s landing page content, to confirm that they are substantially relevant to both the landing page and the user’s search query.
• Trying to ensure that there is substantive content on the landing page to fulfill the user’s query.
• Assessing the duplicative nature of content in overall search results. In cases where there may be content that is duplicated within search results (including landing pages) Microsoft reserves the right to limit advertising of the duplicate content when it lessens the user experience.

Earlier this morning, I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable that there were a number of reports in a noticeable drop in traffic from adCenter. I suspect this is the reason for the drop, but Microsoft said this “is not a radical change.”