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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."
Presumably not punishing google ads (ducks)
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.
you're supposed to stop buying your ads through the obnoxious ad network that does these ads and buy through google to come up in google search
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.)
Well brand pollution/dilution if Google Ads just look 'spammy', so self-interest and user-interest coincide somewhat here. Actually websites that are covered in ads and affiliate links + the traditional 'you are a winner' popup aren't my first choice for shopping or reliable information, in fact. Is that a -big- surprise?
On y va, qui mal y pense!
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?
that Google does this for altruistic reasons. Where is the snake under the grass ?
Profit. They don't want to be known as the search provider to be avoided because they point to link farmers / aggregators / web spammers.
If 90% of power users actively decide to block site X because it completely sucks when logged in using
http://www.google.com/reviews/t?hl=en
Then they may as well block that site for everybody.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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?
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.
It's not about what people want, it's about what Google wants. They don't want to send people from organic results to ads owned by other ad networks, they want to send people to their own ads in search results.
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.
Well it's not entirely altruistic, but it's still beneficial.
The problem is sites like Expert Exchange, any IT person will have searched for an IT problem and got an Experts Exchange link only to click it and find nothing but ads - so many professional IT workers don't realise that the content is actually hidden away at the bottom, after pages of fake blocking content trying to convince you to subscribe such that many go to the page, scroll down a bit, see nothing but ads, then leave the page and try a different link.
If this happens too often people wont get fed up with those sites, they'll get fed up of Google not returning nice results and Google risks losing them to the likes of Bing and Yahoo.
So sure it's not altruistic, it's about keeping users on board by providing the most pleasing results to users as it can, but it's still a good thing IMO.
Many people today probably don't even remember the pre-Google search engines, where you'd far more frequently have to click well past the 1st page of results to find what you want, and had to click into and exit out of far more results because they weren't what you wanted.
The fact is, if Google first searches based on relevance of content, and then given roughly equally content relevance to the search query then starts ranking those pages based on how pleasant they are to use then that makes searching a much less stressful endeavour. As a search engine, the user experience of a search engine is somewhat linked to the user experience of the results it returns - if two search engines return the same results equally ordered by relevance, but then one of them ranks the most pleasant to use sites first where relevance is pretty much identical, which are you going to use? The one where you have to deal with annoying sites to find your answer, or the one where you don't?
1. Click Expert Sex Change result
2. Click back
3. You will see a link appear offering to "block all expertsexchange.com" links from your search results.
Only works if you are logged in to Google in some way, of course.
Nothing wrong with that. Google grew to be the most popular search engine by understanding and implementing what is most acceptable to users of a search page.
Applying the same sort of rating when ranking results is a logical extension and only makes Google more attractive to users.
Next step: deprecate Flash.
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.
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...
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.
Then youtube should also be punished because it is using lots of obnoxious ads above the fold. Even worse as they are often in flash and therefore competing with the video player itself for resources.
Football Odds
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.
I think a simpler answer is that blocking "ad farm" type pages will simply improve the relevance of search results - no matter where the ads are coming from.
which is totally what she said
LOL "deprecate Flash" you do understand Flash is ONLY viable application/game platform on WEB currently? ...
(Silver-light never really took off unfortunately) and HTML 5 is a JOKE every browser has different implementation, and if you decide to make site that will work/is compatible with only 1 browser good luck if you want to reach over 95% users since no browser currently has 95% of market ( Flash has 97%-98% )
if you want to write plain old website HTML is OK but if you want something more modern/dynamic/something that replaces desktop POS/reporting systems/games good luck
I'd really prefer that google Not be ranking websites because of content
Ahhhh, you want the Schrodinger algorithm.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I don't think parent post has it right.
Google is now feeling pressure from Bing (why do feel the urge to write that as 'Bling'?) and this is an excellent move in differentiating its main product from competitors. It is now offering something a large segment of the market is going to appreciate rather than attempting to be everything to all customers.
I may be mistaken, but I do not believe any other search engine has the resources and sophistication to do the kind of analysis that this approach requires on the kind of scale involved. It looks like an excellent way for Google to leverage its strengths in differentiating its product from the competition.
I use Adblockplus, Noscript, and Betterprivacy so on first approximation what Google has done would not seem to affect my browsing habits much: I generally do not see the ads in question anyway. But on looking more closely at what is going on, this move by Google is likely to cause a lot of marginally useful web designers to start using better practices, and that will tend to make everyone's web experience somewhat better, including my own.
And if I use the new Google, which I probably will, I will be less apt to spend my time on shoddy web sites.
Will
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.
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?
Firstly, the results only show up if you're coming FROM google. If you're coming from another search engine that reads google (DuckDuckGo or Qrobe, e.g. I prefer the latter), you get the standard content free crap.
Plus, I've never found information on experts exchange that wasn't better answered on StackOverflow (or another appropriate stack exchange site)
...but if you want something more modern/dynamic/something that replaces desktop POS/ reporting systems /games good luck ...
Funny you should say that.
I'm currently working on a replacement for my company's dashboard/reports front end that is flash based. The replacement is being developed in Python (Flask, SQLAlchemy, pyodbc) and the output is HTML and Javascript. I'm using JQueryUI and jqReports to do my charting and user interface.
The new dashboards are rapidly approaching feature parity with the old dashboards, with the following added benefit:
Flash is definitely on its way out and should rightly be classed as legacy technology. You'd have to be barking mad to start a new project and target Flash.
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.
This won't differentiate google though unless you're already wearing google glasses. If someone can afford better content because they're monetizing it more efficiently - or differently than google THINKS they should, then google is playing a dangerous game of feeling conceited enough that it knows best.
Competition is a good thing. I love it. I'm glad BING is still in the game.. Live.com was a terrible joke. I just think its a dangerious slope for google to follow especially since there is no standard to adhere to. In a word of x resolutions, x browsers, x customers, who is google to decide "above the fold" or even "this much is too much"??