Domain Impacts Quality Score

[Equiano]

I'm at my wits end trying to optimize my landing pages for adwords. When Adwords switched to using the landing page as part of determing your quality score my campaigns virtually had all the keywords marked inactive.

Tried to optimize the pages so they were more revelant to keywords that triggered them

Keywords in meta tags - title, description, keyords. Keyword in H1 tag etc. To no avail ran a little test thats left me totally confused with how goole is determining relevancy

Created a Campaign with 4 adgroups each with the same set of keywords and CPC but different landing pages

Adgroup 1 - Deep Link to Product Page on Merchant site ( Keywords Active)

Adgroup 2 - A exact copy of Product Page hosted on my site ( Keywords Inactive)

Adgroup 3 - Home Page of Merchant. Page has no refernces to the keyword in adgroup (Keywords Active)

Adgroup 4 - Carefully crafted page with all the meta tags and content related to product host on my site (Keywords Inactive)

Given this scenario the conclusion Im drawing is either my domain has been penalized, some domains are given special prefernce or its not the landing page but the whole site thats analysed.

Any guidance would be highly appreciated

[netmeg]

I don't know this for sure, but I would suspect that ultimately performance has a big part to play in determining the quality score - so is your CTR pretty good? If it's a relatively new site, you might need to establish a decent CTR before you see improvements.

[digicam]

Can I ask a related question here -

I could not get the .com domain name I wanted, But I have the .us domain name which matches a popular Adwords search term - any value in setting the Adwords landing page to this domain name which points to the site anyway? or is it suck an see?

cheers