Slashdot Mirror
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
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?
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
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 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.
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?
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
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
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.