Providing a high quality advertising experience for both users and advertisers is important to us. As part of this goal, we've improved how we review and measure landing page quality. The AdWords system retrieves advertiser landing pages to help us better understand the relevance and quality of your AdWords ads as a whole. This function of our system is included in the Google AdWords Terms and Conditions.
The quality information collected will affect your account performance in the future. Landing pages with useful, informative content related to your keywords and ad text are considered to be of higher quality and will receive higher quality scores. This may mean lower cost-per-clicks (CPCs) for your ads. (The inverse is also true - poor quality landing pages will receive lower quality scores.)
You don't need to take any steps to help us visit your landing pages. If you're concerned about the quality of your pages, you may want to review and follow our Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines. These are intended to help you provide the best user experience possible for all visitors, including users who click on your AdWords ads.| More about our visits to your landing pages |
The AdWords system will visit and evaluate all pages specified by your ad destination URLs. It will also follow redirect URLs. (Redirect URLs send a user to another website page without any action on the user's part.) To fully understand the quality of your specified page, the system may follow other links on the page.
Visits from our system won't appear as impressions or clicks in your AdWords account - so you won't be charged for these visits. However, third-party click trackers may log our visits as user visits. We recommend that you contact your provider to learn whether this is the case.
We'll use automated programs to determine how often the system visits advertiser sites and how many pages it visits. For tips on making your pages easy for our system to review, see our Webmaster Guidelines.
Note: Your site's inclusion or ranking in the Google search index won't be affected (positively or negatively) by AdWords system visits.
| How to exclude your landing pages from AdWords visits |
The relevance of your landing page is an important part of the AdWords quality review process. The AdWords system retrieves all advertiser landing pages by default to ensure a fair and consistent review of all advertiser sites within AdWords.
We believe that a non-participating advertiser does detract from the user's search experience, and from the overall quality of the AdWords program. While you can exclude your site from review, this will provide us with little information about your landing page's quality and relevance. Therefore, if you restrict AdWords from visiting your landing pages, you will experience a drop in Quality Scores for your related keywords. (This will cause higher CPCs for any landing page for which you've restricted access.)
While we strongly recommend against restricting our system's automatic review of your landing page, you can edit your site's robots.txt file to avoid a review. The file must explicitly exclude your page from our system visits as follows:
- To prevent AdsBot-Google from accessing your site, add the following to your robots.txt file:
User-agent: AdsBot-Google
Disallow: / - To prevent AdsBot-Google from accessing parts of your site, add the following to your robots.txt file:
User-agent: AdsBot-Google
Disallow: /exclude/
Where exclude represents the directories you don't want the AdWords system to visit.
Note: In order to avoid increasing CPCs for advertisers who don't intend to restrict AdWords visits to their pages, the system will ignore blanket exclusions (User-agent: *) in robots.txt files.
