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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."
Or face the consequences.
Because they use AdBlock (and before any troll comments on the new mode; go to the menu and uncheck the allow acceptable ads section)!
Presumably not punishing google ads (ducks)
that Google does this for altruistic reasons. Where is the snake under the grass ?
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Will they punish themselves?
So, is there a place where we can measure how well our websites conform to google's ideas of user-friendliness?
Or do we have to find out the hard way?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
It must be a pretty impressive algorithm if it's going to sort out good from bad sites... and it'd be interesting to see if it counts its own ads on pages if they're bundled in a bunch of others. I think they need to work on data mining sites which duplicate searches and put them on their sites to pull in clicks when no significant subject matter is really contained within the site itself. That would be better than ad sites.. and this pretty much wreaks of sneakiness.
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
and that good for you mayor villain from Demolition Man. They try to say it's good for you when all they are doing is trying to lock out the competition
All things considered, if a site scores high in search results because it has the most relevant results, I'm okay with scrolling down past the ads that I ignore. If I'm searching for something in a content search engine, it's because I want relevant content; the fluff surrounding that content doesn't really matter to me.
It's all very nice that Google in their infinite wisdom wants to protect me from those harmful ads that I can ignore, but to make the search results less useful is not what I consider an overall positive outcome.
(Mind you, I use Yahoo, so Google needn't listen to me too much.)
In the war for eyeballs, a search engine needs to produce the "best" results for your query, and provide meaningful, useful pages at the top of the list. If your searches on a given provider just bring up link farms or pages which are so strewn with ads that its hard to find the content, you're going to try another search engine. Google makes its money by getting people to search using their engine, and by delivering relevant ads.
I'm a bit surprised they haven't been more aggressive at weeding out crap pages. Or it could just be that they're losing market share, and they looked into why people were going elsewhere.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Good. The thumbnail sized content will be at the top. Bad. The page will reset to the bottom after the onload image refresh script runs.
onload='fuxWithGoogle(evt)'
function fuxWithGoogle(evt) { window.scrollBy(0,100); }
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
What about sites where people have to wade through pages of ads and links to get the actual content they were after, including news that is clipped into small pieces, and spread over a lot of pages, all with lots of ads?
Hopefully this will send Expert Sex Change into oblivion.
So tired of their results.
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.
Not relevant.
For the longest time, you've been able to block domains in google.
http://www.google.com/reviews/t (If logged in)
Amusingly enough, when I loaded /. today there was a banner ad across the top of the homepage (at work, so can't install ABP here).
The correct reason to punish those sites is that there is a very high correlation between excessive ads and crap content (or good content that has been copied illegaly from other sites that will now get a better rating.)
there are a lot of sites meant to display as much ads as they can, with some copied content from somewhere else and every trick in the SEO books to attrack traffic. And how you decide that a site is doing that, like specifically tricking the search engine to think it is normal? Their next move should be to lower the amount of ads, and then the users, if well will keep falling there, at least won't load as much ads as usual.
About "normal" sites, with original content, and lots of ads to make them profitable, probably other factors could keep ranking them higher, and if the line they put between normal use of ads and abusive is high enough could end not hurting a lot and forcing the sites that abuse to give a better end user experience.
From the "Good god, would it kill you to edit submissions for basic grammar" department.
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
Is barely a coherent sentence.
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.
I've developed a habit of using duckduckgo for most routine searches.
I find the thumbnails of neckbeards in Google to be extremely irritating, while duckduckgo shows favicons which can occasionally be useful visual clues.
One ~100px tall advert isn't going to trip this, even if it is full page width.
The intention as I see it is to "punish" sites where, on common browser window sizes, you need to scroll before you see anything that isn't advertising of site logos.
It could be a pain for sites that use images an other binary objects for what should be textual content, but they need a slap any way.
You mean like Gopher?
paintball
So who died and made Google legislator, judge and executor on crimes against appropriate webpage content?
Google have always had complete control over what appears on their own web pages after filtering through their own ranking systems. They aren't making decisions on appropriate content for all web pages on the entire internet, they're making them for pages on their own sites. If you don't like the way Google filters web pages there is nothing to stop you using the other big search engines or even designing your own.
I know there are arguments about what sort of responsibility Google should have due to the sheer size and popularity of their site, but Google didn't ever sign an agreement promising that they'd filter the results exactly the way site owner X wanted them. If someone is really so dependent Google showing them at the top of the results page and on a page stuffed full of adverts to keep their site running then maybe they need to reconsider their business model.
Except those ads will have the same Achilles heel of all ads; they're served from a relatively small number of large companies, and so can be taken out with noscript.
If a site served an ad from their own domain, it would waltz straight though my defences, but I can sleep soundly knowing that will never happen.
What annoys me is when I search for a particular word or phrase, and Google takes me to a page which lacks that word.
I used to be able to type "+blankie" and google would show only those pages that had the word blankie in them. No longer. It just says that + is no longer supported, and takes me to a load of pages without that word.
Also it would be nice if Google did not index the content of the ads. On numerous occasions I have found that the only occurence of my search is in an ad on the page.
Sounds like a great idea. What they really need to is delist companies that crap flood their results with dozens of websites which really only have one back end. An easy example of this is to find is done by plugging in a phone number. You will find dozens of web sites that crap flood the first several pages of Google result's and are obviously all for the same site.
I have a few newspaper websites that I visit, that, to view the content you have to have the ads displayed. The most annoying is a ad called "deal of the day" has this annoying way of working. You scroll half way down the page, start viewing something, and the deal of the day "curtain" scrolls up & down screwing up what you were viewing.
I opening my Google reader on my IGoogle which pops out a bubble windows with Slashdot's page and a GIANT Google ad at the top of the news page...Take a note from your own play book.
What is this "ads" are you talking about? I am actually surprised that given recent wave of crackdown on users by content monopolies, AdBlockPlus is not getting any attention from similarly formidable advertising behemots.
I think people underestimate gigantic influence of AdBlockPlus on the whole generation. I am getting my content exclusively from the Internet and after several years of using it I only can realize how massive this impact is by accidentally getting myself into AdBlockPlus-less situations. In each such case (occaisional glance at the television set while waiting for your oil change in the dealership, friend's computer, etc) I am astonished by the sheer amount of annoying garbage, which modern ads are.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
No, it's attempt to get back true ranking of the website produced by linking by genuine users, not some SEO bots.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Google is not the only search engine in town, it's not a monopoly, and besides, if you feel it's bad value - you can start your own and make a ton of money. Do you think people will go to your own search engine if you do not 'punish websites with excessive ads' as opposed to using Google?
You can't handle the truth.
True, it's only a matter of time until Microsoft discontinues extended support for Windows XP Service Pack 3, the last version of its PC operating system that will not run a version of Internet Explorer with HTML5 . That'll happen in the first half of 2014.
Is what ExpertS-exChange does any worse than what Springer, Elsevier, Wiley, and JSTOR do?
If Google is telling the truth, then I should no longer see any about.com results on the first page.
Although, I'd personally implement a penalty for Comic Sans as the page font
Would you give the same penalty for using such a decorative typeface only in heading elements, not in the body text?
Just start by removing ads directly linked to my last readed email, then you'll be able to remove excessive ads on other sites.
I can't call that English
Seems a bit dodgy to punish websites for hosting banner ads when your company takes out banner ads. It's entirely possible they are filtering based upon the source of ads as well and placing their 'paying' ad customers higher than sites which utilize competing services...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you want a "user experience" with someone second-guessing you and tossing extra keywords into every search, pfft, google it.
I occasionally try new search engines ( Google remained my favorite ) yet recently switched, due to proof that one is better... for me. I'm a scientist. I was convinced by the results of the game, Three Engine Monte, over at http://blekko.com/
" search term /monte "
I was impressed by how often I picked the Blekko search results link. Most often, the more relevant listing was unearthed by Blekko. I found better information with Blekko. I was mightily impressed, and switched. Unless you want local listings every search on a movie title, (which still seems intrusive to me), in which case stick with the big brother who gives you priority paid listings.
Grasshopper, if you are not trying new search engines, regularly, you are <strike>eating search results pablum</strike> missing out on some awesome information.
Obviously their fallback plan is to auto-telemarket us all if they ever run into trouble :-p
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
Crappy search results make Google search look bad, and search users might go elsewhere. It's not altruism, it's customer retention.
You've got the relationship backwards. It's actually quality control on their product, to whit, eyeballs.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
If you've ever had the experience of a having a sales person promise to disclose important information to you as long as you go through their sales pitch, then you know how Google feels about this.
1 You should limit "sidebars" to one left and one right AND THESE SHOULD BE LESS THAN 15% OF THE PAGE COMBINED
2 if your webpages have more than 3 videos AND ANY OF THEM ARE SET TO AUTOPLAY then you need to cut them down
(and that includes the actual "article" video)
3 if your page content is divided into 3X5 card sized chunks just to make more pages YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG
4 if your pages are more than 20% ads or links to the rest of your site YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG (best layout is a bar with major sections ad then the CURRENT SECTIONs subheadings as a second bar)
5 you do not need to have the entire block of every "social" network more than once per section
and lastly the "below the fold rule" if you do not have the actual page content visible in at least the bottom 3/8 of the top screen
[font style = bold red blinking and bleeding] YOU ARE DOING IT VERY VERY VERY WRONG [/font style]
and a hint for you tune for 1024 wide screen since that gets you both the "mobile" and netbook segments (but have your style setup to allow for wider screens)
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
The intention as I see it is to "punish" sites where, on common browser window sizes, you need to scroll before you see anything that isn't advertising of site logos.
That's funny. For a while Google were paying computer OEMs to set a modified version of Google with exactly that problem as the default search engines on an awful lot of PCs.
Without Comic Sans, webmasters would have to buy a Mac for each viewer to make the Chalkboard font available. What alternative to Comic Sans would you recommend that is either preinstalled on Windows PCs or available for @font-face embedding at no charge?
For some reason your style of writing reminds me of someone who's been up for a week without sleep smoking meth and is thus entering early stages of psychosis
i spent five minutes thinking and all i got was this crappy sig
So who died and made Google legislator, judge and executor on crimes against appropriate webpage content?
I have no doubt that you fail to spot the irony in your own post.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
If Google were to spin off DoubleClick as a once again independent company, Google Search would be a "publisher" under DC's AdSense program. To advertise on Google Search, people would buy AdWords packages from DC just as they do now from Google.
But it still seems to be trivial to spam the heck out of Google.
All those websites that contain the single article you're interested in in just a single column - all the other screen real estate being taken up with advertising!
@peetm
I'm pretty sure the journals don't deliberately serve up the whole journal to Google, then block it to you though.
It's fairly well documented on the Internet that they do. Google digs up citations on google scholar cloaking . Essentially, there's a tacit agreement that paywalled scholarly journals participating in the Google Scholar program are allowed to cloak.
Unfortunately they're also heavily linked and highly relevant, so they end up at the top.
It wouldn't be a problem if Google provided an option to always exclude search results that are noarchive .