The Google advertising solution AdWords comes with inreased minimum bids. The “minimum bid” is the lowest amount of money an advertisers is allowed to spend on any search terms within the Adwords network!
The minumum bid a search term “web hosting” to be active for search in Google is now $0.40. News are not good for those who target Canadian customers as well. The minimum cost per click for keywords “canada web hosting” has also been increased to $0.40 per click.
Those however are very low compared to search term “image hosting”. Anyone who wants to make sure their image hosting ads would appear in Google must spend at least $1 on this search term.
The mimumum price of “templates” keyword went $0.50. Those who want to bid on “blog” have to put $0.30 per click in their Adwords acount.
But all those are nothing compared to search term “host”. Google requires a minimum $10.00 bid to make this keyword searchable within the seacrh engine.
Google has recently posted a thread called “Landing page quality update” in their Adwords blog. The thread says:
As you may recall, we began incorporating advertiser landing page quality into the Quality Score back in December 2005. Following that change, advertisers who are not providing useful landing pages to our users will have lower Quality Scores that in turn result in higher minimum bid requirements for their keywords. We realize that some minimum bids may be too high to be cost-effective — indeed, these high minimum bids are our way of motivating advertisers to either improve their landing pages or to simply stop using AdWords for those pages, while still giving some control over which keywords to advertise on. Although it is counter-intuitive to some who hear it, we’d rather show one less ad than to show an ad which leads to a poor user experience — since long-term user trust in AdWords is of overarching importance.
The original thread is available at http://adwords.blogspot.com/2006/07/landing-page-quality-update.html.
You can find “Google AdWords Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines” here:
https://adwords.google.com/select/siteguidelines.html?ctx=awblog&sourceid=awo&subid=us-et-awb-070706_2.
By imposing some “Site Quality Guidelines”, that are promoted as “aren’t hard-and-fast rules, nor are they exhaustive” Google sets definitions such as “Quality Scores” and “useful landing pages”. Those apply to Google’s popular Adwords advertising system where website owners pend money in advertising. By introducing those definitions and guidelines the Search Engine giant makes it’s online advertisers to change their website content if they want to avoid high advertising costs.
Of course Google has the right to set it’s own TOS, rules and Policy and to implement them. But it is very doubtful whether it can use its leading position on the Search engine market to make website owners and online advertisers to change their web site content!
The recent changes in “Google AdWords Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines” make Google a “global censorship institution” in the Search market. The Search engines claims it is competent enough to determine which web sites are good enough by content and which are not!