Can Google Instant Preview CTR Effect Your Quality Score?

Martin Roettgerding has written a fantastic article over at ppc-epiphany on how and why Google might calculate and use quality score in determining ad rank and click prices.  I personally have not been able to see any major impact working on PPC landing page quality, but his logic is really strong.  Generally it boils down to that fact that Instant Preview CTRs can help Google estimate potential revenue, and  use it to their advantage.  Today your landing page does actually make a difference to Google's bottom line.  

He notes that the typical optimization used in SEO provides little quality score improvement and provides advice on how to optimize for the preview, with ideas like making the page more attractive by getting rid of text and using images to improve your CTRs.

This is a must read for the advanced PPC manager and people still trying to understand why Google has moved to using landing page score quality in determining ad rank and click prices.

Did Google Results Favor Obama?

A Wall Street Journal examination found that Google often customizes the results of people who have recently searched for "Obama"—but not those who have recently searched for "Romney."

Here's how it works: When a user searches for the name Obama, Google includes links about President Barack Obama in subsequent searches on terms such as "Iran," "Medicare" and "gay marriage." The altered results are labeled in gray type: "you recently searched for Obama".

You might think that there’s some type of Obama favoritism but it's not something Google’s doing on purpose. It’s just part of how the algorithm works and happens because Google has seen a number of people searching for Obama, then searching for these other terms, it has decided it makes sense to insert some Obama-oriented results into those other searches for many people.

The findings are among the latest examples of how mathematical influence the search results that people encounter online.