Quality score all 10?

[danwhitehouse]

Recently we revised our on page ranking signals. We then thought it a good idea to revise some keywords for attributed PPC campaigns. We accidentally removed one keyword and then re-added it, only to find that the quality score had jumped for a 6 to a 10. Nice! We thought it might be a good idea to delete and re-input keywords to see if their QS changed, they actually all did. 90% of them went to a QS of 10. We actually went through each keyword deleting and replacing and getting the same results.. After coming back to the account (and after emailing my boss with 'win win!') the QSs had returned to normal. What is Google playing at?

[DeeCee]

Are you sure that deleting a keyword did not merely temporarily reset the QS back to a default of 10 ("give user the benefit of the doubt - highest score" type thing), and then when the normal algorithm re-evaluated the account or ad again, it came to the same conclusion as before?

Meaning that reality is that this keyword alone did not have any real impact on the basic quality score. You just caused a re-evaluation to kick in, and got a good default score while waiting for that bot to run as scheduled?

[danwhitehouse]

Possibly, I did not know that this happened so was a little confused when I saw it. Will keep this in mind for next time..

[LucidSW]

You've fallen into the same trap as many others. What happens is not a game Google is playing. It's just the way the system works.

When you add a keyword, the system does a preliminary evaluation of your QS. The important thing to remember is, it does not yet have all the information it needs. It still needs to check your landing page for one thing to see if it complies with policies. I've heard of many an affiliate marketer for example saying the QS was initially set at 7 and 20 minutes later, see it go down to 1 because they had a bridge page or something.

If there's a default QS, it would not be 10 but rather 5 in my mind. It would go up or down depending on some immediately known factors. DeeCee is right, after the normal QS calculation, it came to the same conclusion as before and why your Qs went back to where it was.

[netmeg]

Interestingly, this week I was starting a new campaign for a client with a bunch of brand new keywords, and they all went in at QS10 as well. This account is in great shape; very few keywords under QS7 and in fact last time I added a bunch of new ones, they defaulted to QS7. But this time it was 10. A few hours later, they were all 7's. Just figured it was some Google weird.