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Ask HN: Understanding the Mystery of Adwords QS

4 points by mstefff ↗ HN
I'm not asking what goes into Adwords QS or why mine is always low. I just about have never had any success with any thing I've tried to advertise on Adwords.

But, I'm posting this question because of one main thing. I've come across a large amount of ads that rank very high (position 1-3 consistently; which means they much have a good QS), that feature landing pages with little to no text at all.

How could adwords possibly assign them a high QS for a page that is 95% images?

Examples: https://www.demandbase.com/signup_freetrial_a.html http://www.centraldesktop.com/l?sr=googs&sy=col_onl_np https://www1.gotomeeting.com/t/gg/online_collaboration-Broad/NAPPC/g2msem3 http://campaign.mindtouch.com/C/Download_MindTouch_Deki/4?copy=4

..you get the point

5 comments

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bemmu
Maybe it is based on whether the user immediately pressed the back button or not.
mstefff
huh?
bemmu
Maybe I understood your question wrong. What I thought you meant is "how can QS be so high, even though Google cannot parse the landing page because it is just images". So I assumed there must be some other factor besides landing page text which affects the QS, such as how long the user spent on the page.
wildwood
The demandbase.com landing page is mostly pics, but they do have a lot of alt text for the pics, and decent meta data. They also have their phone number on the page, which Google is supposed to love.

The centraldesktop.com and gotomeeting.com pages seem to have plenty enough text on the pages for Google's bots to make quality assessments.