AdWords Editor 5.1 update includes, the previous four tabs for advertisements (text, image, local business, and mobile) now been grouped under a single ‘Ads’ tab. This update has been incorporated due to a constant ‘space issue’ in the interface. However, this issue only bothered a handful of users. Well, it seems Google does recognize the importance of each and every user after all.

There are some posts on Webmaster World on the release of AdWords Editor 5.1. One of the most interesting post that caught my eye, stated:

“If you do upgrade, and you have comments on any of your campaigns, ad groups, keywords, ads, or anything, make sure you export them out first before you do your upgrade! I learned the hard way that upgrades wipe out comments.”

On the other hand, according to Search Engine Roundtable, Google AdWords has scheduled a system-wide maintenance on Saturday, May 17th 2008. The advertisements will be functioning, but the Application Programming Interface (API) will be shut down. So, do not get all worked up, if you do not see your API running. It would be up and running as soon as the maintenance is completed.

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Aaron offers some really interesting speculation about why this may be occurring. The most interesting theory was the notion that it was an anchor text problem. Here is what Aaron had to say:

I think this issue is likely tied to a stagnant link profile with a too tightly aligned anchor text profile, with the anchor text being overly-optimized when compared against competing sites.

Whether or not this is occurring now, this makes complete sense. It is well within Google’s (or any other search engine’s) ability to detect an unusually high density of one form of anchor text to a given domain. For example, if your site is called yourdomain.com, and you sell widgets, and the anchor text in 48 or your 65 links says “Widgets on Sale”, this is not natural.

Most of the links to your site should be the name of your domain itself (i.e. in this example, “yourdomain”). Such a distribution of anchor text is a flag that the anchor text of your links are being artificially influenced. How is that done? Why by purchasing links, or by heavy duty link swapping.

This is potentially another step in Google’s stepped up war against the practice of link buying. I have long maintained that the main advantage the link buying has over natural links is the fact that people who buy links get to specify the exact (keyword rich) anchor text. used. Looking for unnatural patterns of anchor text provides a backdoor into detecting people who are purchasing links.

It might be a bit heavy handed for Google to ban a site based on this type of evidence, but reducing the impact of anchor text on rankings when there is an unnatural distribution in play still helps them meet their goal. After all, even if the unnatural acnhor text campaign does not represent the result of a link buying campaign, and all those keyword laden links are in fact completely natural, it might still provide better relevance for Google to filter in this manner.

Thinking about this further, this might be a simple search quality adjustment for skewed anchor text distribution. If it affects paid links, from Google’s perspective, this might just be a bonus.

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