Google Fed Up With Bad Keyword Choices

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the let-us-do-it! dept

Search engine optimizers charge a lot of money to companies to help them choose better keywords to trigger their Google ads. However, it appears Google thinks they can do a better job themselves (or at least help those who don’t bother shelling out money to an SEO firm) by scanning the advertiser’s website and automatically picking the best keywords to trigger ads. This seems like a natural extension of their contextual advertising offering – where the idea is to scan content pages to determine what kind of advertising should show up on that page. The difference here is they’ll be scanning pages to determine what kind of advertising should attract people to that page. One aspect of this would apparently allow online merchants to provide a data feed of their products, to automatically have them show up in (hopefully relevant) searches as text ads. In some ways this is quite similar to the technique used for paid-inclusion in other search engines – but the ads will still be separate. As with any automation of such things, the big question is in how well it works. Companies aren’t going to be thrilled if their advertising starts showing up on searches that have no relevance.