From my personal experiments during the last few months, also feedbacks I got and read in forums and other places, we now come to a conclusion that the quality of the entire site matters in determining if a landing page is acceptable or otherwise.

Note that we can’t be 100 percent sure about what Google really wants because none of us has actually dissect the source code or document behind landing page quality.

But through a lot of data from various sources and industries, we could draw acceptable guidelines to create better landing page.

Landing Page Experiments and Reports

1. A forum user moved his landing page from a low content domain to an existing domain which had a lot of content. He immediately got his low priced keywords back.

2. I found that squeeze page is okay as long as the page has links to other pages of content in the same domain. The domain in which the landing page resides can not contain only one page. It is required that the landing page also connects to other pages on the domain.

3. Grouping focused keywords into groups become more important. You can not expect to dump thousands of keywords into one ad group and expect it to work. It become even more necessary to optimize every part of the campaign.

4. Google AdSense is not the culprit. If the landing page contains Google AdSense ads and other rich content pages, the AdWords campaign was not affected at all. Again, if the site contain only thin content which sole purpose was to drive traffic and then to monetize again through Google AdSense, that site was definitely penalized.

Hypotheses

Through repeat reports from many advertisers, we could now say with 90 percent certainty that in order to get low keyword bid price, advertisers need a real website.

No longer that we could quickly create a landing page to test a market by getting them to answer to a question — for product ideas, for example.

Well, that method would possibly still valid if we could host that landing page on a related domain and make it look like as if the landing page is actually part of the domain.

Now, it becomes obvious why generic ads with very general targeting still run while your ads had to pay in the range of $1 - $10. Targeting is not the problem, content is — at least in this update. Although the ad had a bad targeting, it turns out that the site has lots of solid content.