Most people do not realize that Google has a completely separate indexing algorithm for its pay-per-click search engine advertising program (Adwords). The reason I say this is because this week it is rumored that Google's Adword algorithm may now be taking into account the loading speeds of web pages and assigning higher minimum bids to pages that take longer to load. This seems to be one additional factor that will now go into computing what Google calls its "quality score" for the web pages of advertisers using the Adwords program.

Basically Google is trying to crack down on low quality sites that are using the Adwords program to drive traffic to the advertisers website. In a nutshell, for pay-per-click advertising campaigns, the advertiser has to pay Google whatever the current bids are for each click that is generated from a particular search phrase and sends the visitor from the sponsored ad on Google.com to the advertiser's site. If Google deems that the advertiser has a site with a low "quality score" that particular advertiser may have to pay a higher minimum bid for the click than another advertiser with a site that has a higher "quality score".

Thus it is very advantageous for companies to hire SEO and SEM companies like SlickRockWeb that specialize in optimizing pay-per-click campaigns so the company can maximize its advertising dollars with web pages and/or landing pages that produce the highest possible "quality score".

As David A. Utter on Webpronews.com states, "Slow loading pages hurt the user experience, and can lead people to abandon those pages, Google noted on the Inside AdWords blog. Once Google drops its load time evaluations onto an account's Keyword Analysis page, advertisers will have one month to make adjustment."

Because Google has datacenters all over the country, apparently Google will assess the load times relative to servers in the geographic region of the site in question.

If Google has found that your site is performly poorly in terms of loading speeds there are a few suggestions that Google makes to improve this. Use fewer redirects, make sure all images in the site are adequately compressed, minimizing usage of iframes, and minimize the usage of bandwidth intensive files such as audio files and/or Flash files.

Many other factors go into how Google determines the "quality score" for a particular webpage and essentially the lower your "quality score" the more you will have to pay relative to your competition. Our analysis on some of our client's pay-per-click campaigns have revealed that with the higher "quality scores" that we achieve for them results in savings of anywhere from 10-40%. In a couple of cases we have been able to reduce monthly spends of $10,000 down to $1,000 with very little difference in overall performance.

Feel free to contact us if you would like to investigate whether or not your pay-per-click advertising campagins are completely cost-effective.

Kind regards,

SlickRockWeb Inc. a leading provider of affordable SEO services -- "Bringing you business one click at a time."