Except when it comes to PPC ad-ranking. Yahoo recently announced that it will move away from the transparent model Overture originally pioneered where ad position was based solely on bid, and moving more to a Google-like model where things like ad quality are taken into account.

Here’s what Yahoo! defines as ad quality, as messaged from their e-mail to advertisers (source: Threadwatch):

What is “Ad Quality”?
Ad quality is determined by:
The ad’s historical performance - its click-through rate relative to competitors and normalized for position.

The ad’s expected performance - determined by various relevance factors considered by Yahoo!’s ranking algorithms, relative to other ads displayed at the same time.

No mention of landing page quality, which Google also incorporates.

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