Following in the footsteps of Google, then Yahoo, MSN has decided to implement Quality Based Ranking for adCenter.

Now that they have been online for a while and have a relatively usable client base they are able to actually have some basis to judge ads against each other with a little history behind them. In my estimation this is a better way to handle the quality score than what Yahoo did with Panama just letting them all start out shooting against each other with no real historical data to go on. Google just flowed it into the system without anyone really seeing much difference (like most things they do with us blinded).

adCenter Quality-Based Ranking

On the 16th April we improved how we establish the quality and relevance of ads and landing pages in relation to the search user’s likely intent. This improvement will ensure that we maintain a high quality of ads and relevance to the Live Search user and is not a radical change, but an enhancement to our existing guidelines around relevance and quality. To ensure that we are delivering maximum benefit to the search user, we are doing the following:

• 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.

In addition to this blog post, to ensure that our advertisers are aware of this upcoming change, we have contacted customers who we think may be affected by this update. However, even if you have not been contacted, we recommend using the following resources to ensure that ads you submit in the future are of the highest quality.

Resources:

• adCenter Editorial Best Practices

• adCenter Ad Ranking Best Practices

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