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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)
Google ads aren't generally splashed over the entire top of the intial screen loaded page. While I don't want to sound like a google shill here, I really don't get how they make their money - aren't google ads generally little text areas with "Advertisement" written above them? I am not one to click on ads, but I know that I have clicked on a few by mistake - but never Google ones that I knew of - they really seem to make their ads be known as ads.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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