Restructuring your Adwords account can significantly improve your account’s performance and can make it easier for you to manage your account moving forward. Indeed, at some stage you might need to restructure your account or you might inherit an account that requires restructuring.

Restructuring an Adwords PPC account can often result in a decrease in quality score which in turn impacts the performance of your account by driving up costs and reducing traffic to your site. In most cases the drop in quality score tends to recover after a few weeks but this can take several weeks and might be unacceptable to your stakeholders especially if the account is already under performing.

Outlined below is a simple approach to restructuring your Adwords account to minimise the negative impact on your quality score but in order to understand why this approach works let’s have a look at how quality score is calculated first.

If you are like me and you use OSE Open site Explorer from Seomoz for evaluating URLs for SEO then you might have installed an OSE Bookmarklet to help you quickly load pages in OSE for analysis.

With the new update to OSE I have noticed that my OSE bookmarker no longer loads in OSE with the required filters in place i.e. with the filters set to: followed +301, only external, pages on root domain and group by domain.

I decided to fix this and I have created two new OSE Bookmarklet codes – one for loading the URL, and another for loading the domain and I have decided to share these below because that is what the internet is all about.

Google claims to care about “user experience” especially when it comes to quality score and their advertising policies, so I find it curious that Google forces businesses to bid higher to appear in the top position for queries that are clearly brand related (see case below for Chartis Travel Insurance).

Such practice by Google will clearly result in a bad user experience for users who are clearly looking for a specific brand related product but finding a different advertiser in the top ad position don’t you think? Off course forcing business to bid more means more money to Google.

Why cloak paid links?

As most SEOs will tell you, the buying and selling of links online is still very common practice but there are lots of cowboys out there. Some link sellers are going to the extreme measure of cloaking their paid links from the search engines to avoid being penalised for selling links. This means for example the seller might add a nofollow attribute to the paid link when the page is requested by the search engines but not when requested by normal users. This off course makes the link worthless for the purpose of search engine optimisation.

Does cloaking paid links work?

Now you are probably thinking that such cloaking technique is more likely to get the link sellers penalised than actually selling links but I am not so sure about that. Such a minute change to a page that does not change the content of the page displayed to the user might be over looked by the search engine; besides, the cloaking of paid links actually helps the search engines filter out paid links. Regardless, it pays to check if a site you intend to buy or exchange link with is cloaking their paid links.

While none of what I am about to discuss is ground breaking or new, I have found that many sites, including those optimised by SEO specialist, make the common mistake of inappropriately using the robots.txt file to block search engine access to content.

Both the robots.txt file and meta robots tag can be used to block search engines from accessing content on a site, but which approach is better for SEO?