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Google Updates Algorithm To Punish Websites With Excessive Ads
hypnosec writes "Google has decided to take punitive actions against those websites that flood the top of their web pages with ads due to which the visitors have to scroll down to finally view the relevant contents on the page. According to Google, this type of layouts annoys the users and thus the web search company will be penalizing those websites through search results. The company disclosed this on its blog. According to Google over the top ads is not good for user experience and thus such websites might not get high ranking on Google web search."
Any ad which uses Javascript has a performance hit, which lets face it is ALL ads. And it's noticeable since all ad serving "platforms" are old-skool, chain-loading, document.writing, bloated piles of shit.
Check the waterfall diagram for a simple adsense text unit. Yep, that's what I'm talking about.
There are human testers involved. I did this for a while. Basically you get thrown 10 pages that are mostly all alike and you have to pick the best one. So the page with fewer ads and the same content will be marked as better by the testers. This will then push that page higher in the algorithm. Other test include visiting 10 sites for a search query and marking which ones display the data, which ones are virus filled, which ones have too many ads etc. There is a review process as well. I also vaguely remember doing a test where a previous tester said these things about a page, are they correct? It's subjective, but you definitely can tell a good page from a bad page quickly.
Google's little text-only ads are the only ones I (and many others) find acceptable. They tend to be relevant, are easily ignored, and don't detract from the aesthetics of the page. For those reasons, I generally don't block Google's ads and have once or twice clicked on them because they really were relevant.
The ones I really hate are the ones that come up over the content and you have to search for a way to close it... especially the ads that do this behavior when you accidentally move the mouse over the ad.
My pet peeve with google searches is when I get page after page of pages which have just stolen the text from Wikipedia and placed it on their site with ads.
And yet they let experts-exchange get away with their faking out google, despite the fact that it's well-known that they do it AND google has said that's explicitly a no-no...
You can quote the individual words to force them to show up as written, or you can use the "verbatim" option under "more search tools" on the left bar.