In the world of internet search “quality” and “relevance” are highly valued, since if people cannot find quality sites that are relevant to what they are searching for the search engines will become irrelevant. Google is yet again leading the way when it comes to standards of quality and relevance in pay-per-click advertising.

AdWords is changing how it calculates the “AdWords Quality Score”, which helps determine the order or rank of each ad listed in the keyword search results. Google is now calculating quality in real-time as a Google user does a search. Google has previously only calculated based on analyzing click-through-rates, and landing pages quality, both of which are evaluated less often. In addition, Google is getting rid of the “inactive for search” moniker for keywords that have few if any impressions. The biggest change though is the replacement of the “minimum bid prices” with “first page bid estimates”. This particular change might cause a bidding frenzy, but this encourages advertisers to be more aggressive and more dominant and this is not entirely a bad thing, for Google of course, but also for advertisers wanting to know what it will take to dominate. And since when is dominating Google’s search results a bad thing?