Does PageRank Affect Your PPC Quality Score?

One question that I’ve heard asked once or twice is, “Does a landing page’s PageRank affect the quality score of your pay per click advertising campaign?” Honestly, I haven’t seen any evidence that it does, but it may.

We do know that the search engines look at your landing page architecture and link structure, keyword use, design elements, load time, and several other factors that help determine the page’s rank for its key search terms. They also look at the pay per click ad content’s compatibility and relevance to the landing page. But whether the PageRank comes into play in the quality score is something that I haven’t seen too many people try to answer. Nor do I see any wisdom in judging quality on that basis.

Think about PageRank is. It’s a measure, albeit somewhat shady now in these days of massive spam, of a page’s authoritativeness as determined largely by the number and quality of inbound links to a particular page. Seeing as how we know that PageRank can be gamed by webmasters seeking to manipulate to their advantage by adopting aggressive link building campaigns and using blackhat SEM techniques, it would seem a bit unethical for Google to allow that to influence what advertisers are paying for clicks. Theoretically, certain webmasters could manipulate their PageRank for the sole purpose of achieving a high quality score and lowering the price they pay for clicks. That would be unfair to other advertisers who are trying to play by the rules.

Do I have any definitive evidence that PageRank does not affect pay per click quality score? No. But no one else has any evidence that it does, either. Quite frankly, I’d be surprised if it did.