In last weeks comment, I talked about the power of AdSense forums. I could have said the same thing about all of the blogs dealing with AdSense too. There are plenty of those and theyre stuffed with great information from people on the cutting edge of AdSense techniques.

The most important of these is probably AdSenses own blog.

Thats always worth keeping an eye on. Its where any changes are likely to be announced, its where you can pick up a few tips straight from the horses mouth... and its where you can sometimes get a behind the scenes view of how Google chooses the ads you get on your site.

Thats really the big mystery of AdSense. Sure, we can play around with the keywords on the page and we can block ads that we dont want to display but thats about it. When we open our own web pages, weve really got no idea whether were going to see ads for dried mangoes or for air tickets to Burkina Faso.

The latest entry at the AdSense Blog reveals a little about how ads are ranked and mentions a term that I doubt many people are family with: an ads Quality Score.

According to Google, Quality Score is determined by your [the AdWords advertisers] keyword's clickthrough rate (CTR), relevance of your ad text, historical keyword performance, the quality of your ad's landing page, and other relevancy factors.

Thats a whole bunch of different factors and like many of the things considered by Google, we dont know any of them as they relate to a particular ad (and neither do the AdWords advertisers).

What strikes me about this definition though isnt the relevance of ad text or historical keyword performance. If an ad isnt relevant or is dedicated to a poor-performing keyword, I dont want it.

Its the fact that Google also rates the quality of the ads landing page.

Ive got no idea how they measure that. What Google might consider a poor landing page someone else might think of as a good one.

As a publisher, I can pretty much let that ride. But I also have to drive traffic to my sites and if Im using AdWords, its just one more reason to make sure that my site looks the part.

Maybe thats Googles bonus contribution to the Internet: an incentive to increase the quality of Web pages. I just wish I knew Googles idea of quality.