Good *Quality Scores* & Landing Pages with AdCenter (Microsoft's PPC)?

To increase QS, create ads with higher click rates. QS has nothing to do with how many words on your page. It's all about relevance and appeal of your ad as perceived by the searchers, thus why click rate is the bulk of the QS calculation. This all assumes that you follow the rules and guidelines.

Yes, that's why I said provided you follow all the Adwords rules and guidelines. If you don't, your QS is dropped to 1 and is effectively the off switch.

So, if you are determined to have a squeeze page, until you fix it, your QS will be 1. Same if you have a bridge page or violate any of the other rules. Otherwise, it will be calculated normally. If you're a really bad boy or girl and don't fix or continually ignore the rules, they'll simply terminate your account.

There are few things ON the landing page that will affect your QS. Keyword relevancy is one but unless you are silly enough to use "dog food" as a keyword when you are selling cat food or something totally irrelevant like kitchen tables, that should not be a problem, right?

What Adwords does is determine a theme to your page. That theme must match the theme of your keywords, otherwise they are irrelevant. This means you don't need to have "feline nourishment" as a keyword on your page when you use that keyword in your campaign. It knows feline nourishment or feline supplement is equivalent to cat food, something called keyword latency. Of course, you need to help the system along as much as possible. You need enough text and your title and description tags will go a long way to help it determine your page's theme. Keyword tag doesn't hurt either but all must be in sync.

Having the keyword in the ad helps but there's more to it than that. Your ad must appeal to the searcher. If you don't have an incentive for them to click, they won't. I laugh at those always saying to put the keyword in the ad, preferably the title, and get a better QS. I say, not necessarily.

For the last time, direct linking, if you're talking about linking from your ad to an affiliate's site, is not against the rules. What gets you in trouble is not doing your homework and linking to a page that violates the rules. And since you don't control that page and can't make changes, you're screwed. If the affiliate makes a change that violates a rule, you're screwed again.

Many will say Adwords doesn't like affiliates or Clickbank. That's not true. Most CB pages I've seen clearly wouldn't pass the test so I'm not surprised people say don't use Adwords to promote CB products. Best to stick with "safe" affiliates. By the way, Bing is not much better as they have pretty much the same rules.