Google Has Started Penalizing Mobile Websites with Intrusive Pop-Up Ads
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1. Take Linkedin for example: you search for a person on google; google shows a linkedin result; you go to linkedin but you are greeted with giant popup asking you to login to view info. Ridiculous.
2. Same with Quora: they come in results with basic info, but when you go to their page, they forward you to registration/login page.
These practices are not ok in my book. Surely, they can do whatever they want on their websites but if Google indexes you and shows some info in search results, then you better show that info on your page without forcing me to register.
PS: To be clear -- this behavior happens on mobile version of their websites. Not sure how it plays out on desktop.
If those sites show something else to you than they show to Google Bot, that's against Google's policy and they should be penalized, so I'm assuming they aren't.
If energy required to get to the information you need through that path is too much (i.e. lots of people bounce on that page), that will again, generally, result in putting it lower in search results.
So either most people agree on putting up with the login page (or are logged in already), or some other factors which I assume you'd like to discount keep those pages so high.
1. Open your mobile browser.
2. Ask a question on Google and add "quora" so you get some results.
3. Open Quora's result link
4. See that result for a brief second and
5. Be forwarded to registration page, which doesn't have any close or cancel out buttons.
6. Try tapping back and you are back to Google results
7. Curse at Quora and never tap on their results again.
That last point is only for me. There is a choice to register. You are free to choose.
PS: You are right, the information that Google showed/indexed is there on Quora. But for regular people (not Google bots), it's there for a second. IDK about you but I'd place this behavior into dark pattern UX book.
PPS: For people, who don't believe this behavior, you can see the video of my experience on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiOMwRwXLcg
When it was still available as an account setting I used it to filter out the awful "resources" like expertsexchange and that one Oracle consultant site with the hilarious pictures. When I see Quora results I long for that feature to be returned.
For example, I just searched for a random ORA-number error and got this in the results: http://dba-oracle.com/t_ora_12514_tns_listener_does_not_curr...
That looks useful, no?
I admit, I've never gone to that site directly or clicked any links only ever saw what showed up on my search results.
Also, google bot would be redirected too, unless of course it's simply logged in :)
Here is a screenshot of the page I am being forwarded to automatically: http://pho.to/Aatuj
It is a disguised register page because after you make 10 selections, you are forced to sign up.
If you clear your cookies and go from a Google search result to Quora, you can read the answers on the page that you're on. If you navigate to any other question, say via the links at the bottom of the page for similar / related questions, the answers will be blocked by the signup popup.
If, instead of signing, you go back to Google and search for the same "<question> quora" it'll work again. The thing to remember is only the first page you navigate to from Google will display properly.
The actual behavior of Quora, if you aren't midway through account signup is:
if you go through Google search it shows you the page promised.
If, from that page, you click on another question it will open the second question but give you the sign up modal. You can bypass a signup modal and get the normal page by appending ?share=1 to the end of the URL.
I don't even have a Quora account but I read the ?share=1 trick a while ago on hacker news.
I never tapped on anything after I got to that page.
The behavior that you guys are suggesting is mostly how it works on Desktop computers. Try searching for the same on Mobile phones.
PS: Also, do you really expect users to alter the link on tiny mobile screens?
I don't "expect" users to do anything, I was sharing a known workaround in case anyone was interested.
EDIT: I just created an account to see what happens. You are logged into a new account. Maybe you accidentally logged in with Google?
I created a new account with a fake name and email. No email verification. After the fake name and email is entered they ask you to follow topics (which is the screenshot you are seeing) and once you pick 10 your account is "complete" and they will let you look at the answer.
Following Bartosz Goralewicz's post about how well botting works to manipulate Google in...2014 I think? there's a small black hat industry that's sprung up around imitating this kind of user reaction, and it does reportedly work to remove pages from Google. I've had my suspicions that it's been used against sites I've worked on a few times (2 or 3).
TL:DR; Quora should generally not be ranking so well (but Google's complex enough to be unpredictable on a page-by-page basis these days).
Sometimes the original may not be able to handle the traffic.
source image-> indexed by Pinterest -> Google index of Pinterest index -> Pinterest page -> source image.
I can't believe that Google is incapable of navigating around this, but Pinterest would probably block them from indexing if they did.
Or console-mode browsers.
I mentioned a site earlier today which sold plumbing supplies.[1] They pop up a "gimme your email" box which 1) cannot be dismissed, and 2) isn't even theirs, it's from "justuno.com", a spamming service.
These outfits have lost sight of what their web site is for. They're putting obstacles in front of a customer who's about to give them money. This is usually considered a big mistake in retail.
Given they're all from the same company usually whose name escapes me right now, you'd think they'd be better at it?
A business model worth of our admiration!
It's easy to see how this happens; a clueless exec at big-corp decides they need data, survey company gives them a sales pitch they can't refuse, exec never bothers to actually check out the product.
These worthless surveys are almost exclusively on the websites large enterprisey companies that got off the clue-train years ago.
I've never tested it, so I have no idea if it works. It's an interesting hypothesis at least.
Yeah, they all say that. The question is: if that's true, then why aren't more sites using "survey popups'?
Agreed - and those surveys are often powered by? ... Google!
This is indeed a little hypocritical of them.
We need to do something abut intrusive ads, but I'm not sure this is it.
Extra negative points if your account creation process requires a phone number or e-mail address verification step.
A good e-commerce site will give you the option of creating an account only at the end of checkout and the account is totally optional. I've seen it before but unfortunately it's not the majority.
Like most ticketing operations, they've built a niche monopoly. If you want to buy tickets online, they are usually the only game in town. If the obnoxious ads annoy you, their attitude is basically "fuck you, drive to the mall and miss your movie".
To be significantly successful, you need to stop thinking this way. Start thinking about what benefits you & your company.
It may seem like contempt for the consumer, and perhaps it is. But it's also possible the consumer is irrational and you can benefit in the short and long term.
I work in marketing, and have seen scant evidence for the value of a "brand". It's mostly branding people making an argument that comic sans devalues our brand, whereas the data clearly shows it doesn't.
The "long term harm" argument is indistinguishable from "i know better than you and I want it this way." It may be true, but it's unprovable.
To what do you attribute the success of, say Coca Cola, rather than generic cola? Price and a good distribution network? Surely brand must contribute a little.
In nearly every SMB branding exercise/project I've participated in, the need for a brand, and the benefits it provides, are entirely limited to the egos of the employees.
In my experience companies that do this are thinking very short term: how many people can we get through our funnel this month and how much money can we make from them? Yes it's hard to measure 'long term harm', but to assume it doesn't exist because it can't be directly measured makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot.
To me it is worth aspiring to be respected as a business. Obviously not to the point of letting your business fail because you obsessed over branding while nobody actually bought your product, but as a larger goal. A business that tries to squeeze customers for all it can and achieves grudging acceptance isn't something I aspire to be a part of.
Coca Cola has nearly infinite resources, compared to the jobs I've worked (<$75mm annual revenue).
Even then, can they prove the value of their brand is an effective use of their marketing dollars? What I've read has a lot of correlations that could be explained by other causes.
For a good read on this, check out the Intel Inside section on this article: https://conversionxl.com/cro-vs-branding/
Brand awareness is the measurement of the degree to which potential customers know that your product or service is an option when they are ready to make a purchase. You can't measure it from your marketing interactions alone, because the data set of your interactions is biased toward potential customers who are already aware of you. You can only measure it by performing statistically valid sampling of potential customers. The business purpose of measuring awareness is to help you find customers who have never interacted with your brand.
Brand affinity is the measurement of the degree to which potential customers have an emotional attachment to your product or service. A good shorthand is the degree to which a potential customer thinks of themselves as a "________ person." Think of a dude in a pickup truck saying "I'm a Ford guy, they've never let me down," or a person who won't even look at a phone that is not an iPhone. Again--the only way to measure this is by performing statistically valid sampling of potential customers. Measuring your marketing interactions alone will give you an artificially high measure of your affinity.
Design standards are important to both awareness and affinity.
A standard look helps the customer make mental connections between all the various times they've been exposed to your brand--this raises awareness. Comic Sans is not necessarily bad for awareness as long as you use it consistently in an intentional way. Randomly varying your fonts is bad, though, because it makes you "look" like several different brands, which means you will need to deliver more interactions to raise awareness.
Comic sans also might harm certain affinities, for example along the lines of being "sophisticated" or "beautiful." If a customer wants to think of themselves as sophisticated, they will seek brands that also present themselves that way. You're not going to see Mercedes Benz, which depends heavily on affinities of sophistication and elegance, using Comic Sans. You might see Scion, which depends on affinities of quirkiness and irony, use it. But again, the point is to be intentional.
Companies that are good at branding tend to be good either because they measure it compulsively (example: Proctor and Gamble), or because they are good at making internal opinionated decisions that stick (example: Apple).
Either way, the day to day operation of a strong brand does indeed look like a few people within a company telling everyone else what they can and cannot do with design.
I don't have any experience with billion dollar companies. Have you worked in the industry and seen how they measure their campaign efficacies in huge companies? I bet it's really different than what I've seen.
Based on what I've seen, it's a lot of story telling that "branding" works. The question is, does it work better than if the company had put those resources into other avenues? Improve the product. Decrease the cost to consumer. Better customer service.
Here's a good cro vs. branding article, check out the Intel Inside section. [0].
There's a lot of money being made by people working in branding. If their field actually wasn't very effective, I wonder if it would be possible for them to accept it. I generally wouldn't want to find out that my career has essentially been a waste, and I created no value. (insert sinclair quote here)
Both opt-in and opt-out ways of doing surveys on your website introduce bias. The opt-out (read: in your face pop-up) is more likely to make people angry which makes them more likely to leave negative reviews.
The opt-in version will only be found by people having a relatively extreme opinion about your site, good or bad.
The difference being in the quantity of the data. The first will probably be answered by more people, since the people who'd have completed the survey in the second case are probably more or less a subset of the people who would complete the survey in the first case. All of this makes it no surprise that most websites that want to have any kind of feedback from their users go for the opt-out strategy. More is better if less is not in any way more :)
I think you wanted to say local maxima, but yes I agree.
Is it? Grocery stores keep essentials far away from each other so you have to walk past stuff you don't want in order to get to what you want. Imagine a store where they had milk at the checkout counter! That's the retail equivalent of amazon.com ;)
Then again, I guess if you're going to target for milk you're probably doing it wrong...
Additionally, any time you see milk that is shelf stable (doesn't require refrigeration until opened) its been UHT pasteurized and packed in special aseptic packaging.
And, yes, I've noticed that, for some reason, organic milk tends to be UHT pasteurized more often than non-organic milk.
I don't know if this is their logic, but it makes sense.
If your sentiment were true, most heavily weighted expendables would all be located in the back simply because of labor. Labor is cheap when you can increase revenue from every potential customer with basic layout adjustments.
They are. At least in almost every grocery store I've been in. The milk coolers are almost invariably against the back wall, accessible from the stockroom (which itself has the loading dock), as is the butcher / meat department. Both of those departments are probably getting daily deliveries, and it's of stuff that needs to be kept cold, has a short shelf life, and in the case of milk specifically, it needs to be stocked from the back of the shelves so that the oldest items get bought first (i.e. it's FIFO not FILO). It's a real pain to do this if you can't get to the back of the cooler.
Bread, however, is generally in its own aisle because it's not stocked by the store. Vendors (the bakeries) send their own delivery/logistics people in to stock it, so the stores don't really care about how easy it is, and those vendors also pull expired or near-expired items back off.
Produce, despite being expendable and delicate, tends to be towards the front because it's very high-margin for the store and also requires a lot of continual employee attention (and it generally has dedicated employees who just do that). It's admittedly been a long time since I worked in a grocery store, but back in the day in the pecking order of grocery-store floor workers, the produce guys were sort of at the top of the heap. (Although maybe that was because they could hook you up with the "damaged" fruit...)
If it were more profitable for the store to stock milk in the front they would - I agree. But the reasoning isn't delivery layout when they manufacture their own layout.
Either way, I thought this was an interesting take on it http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/07/23/334076398/episo...
The less expensive store-brand-label milk is at the back of the store where the big walk-in coolers are.
Supermarkets have varying strategies for stuff, including cold items. The supermarkets around me put ice cream in either a center aisle or the second to last aisle, in the front of the store. The "smarter" store from a data standpoint has pint ice cream in an end cap next to the florist to nab women. Milk is always back corner.
If they can figure out how to maintain the cold chain for ice cream, I'm sure milk would be easier to move around.
My wife never buys me flowers :-(
But I am a sucker for a pint of ice cream :-)
It not that it's impossible to maintain the cold chain with other placements, it's that there is a cost (including that imposed by floor traffic) in doing so. Putting it someplace where a large volume walk-in cooler can be directly loaded from a truck and the display stocked from that without employee floor traffic across the store reduces the costs (labor, losses, and otherwise) of selling milk.
Their conclusion: the jury is out, but "never breaking the cold chain" is a good contender.
Idk being told to try making it more accessable by a consultant who's job it is to maximize profits and the grocer does "what it wants anyway" doesn't sound right on an industry scale.
More comparable would be like someone standing in front of the checkout and insisting you take a survey before you can pay. In that scenario I can very much imagine someone getting pissed off and leaving.
With this move has been a growth in convenience stores that are operated/franchised by the big supermarket brands. People go to these places for their milk. (And do a big online shop for the bulk of their groceries).
So people are just deciding not to go to the big box stores in the first place.
Anecdote, but this happened to me. Where I was living the largest 'Tesco Extra' imaginable opened up literally across the road. This was AMAZING. Well, not really, within a week we were back to the convenience store buying everything there, it really was too much hassle going to the giant Tesco. Didn't need the kilometre walk past the TV's, clothing and other stuff that was placed between the store entrance and the milk. The 24/7 novelty wore off too, didn't actually need to go shopping for that pint of milk at 2 a.m.
Another part of the problem was that the customer service in the local store was more friendly. They didn't have people to greet you or people giving you free samples or any coupons at the checkout or any loyalty cards. Just polite 'how's your day?' chat with the small team of staff - all known by name - sufficed.
With the big supermarket I don't think there was this inate customer service aspect, 'customer service' was contrived marketing, nobody cared about you. And so it is online. People that do marketing online care more about their Google analytics and loading up websites with spam-scripts than they do about 'reality'. They may have one result per quarter from that pop up, that extra sale is good, a result, success even. Not on their dashboard is how many people didn't buy because of the stupid 'enter email address now:' popup they had on there. Marketing people are not the sharpest knives in the drawer, far too often they lack the skills of empathy and cannot see things from the customer's perspective. Hence they have to use things like statistics in an attempt to make up for their lack of intuition and appreciation of customer service.
You can buy self stable milk in the US but it's not very popular for some reason. Except for Yoo-hoo, that's a popular milk product that's usually sold in shelf stable "juice boxes"... and I think it tastes even better at room temperature.
When milk alternatives like soy milk, almound milk, coconut milk, etc., first came to market they were almost always sold shelf stable. I can only assume that's because refrigeration space in supermarkets is sparse and expensive (learned that from Shark Tank) and these were niche products at the time. Now that they are mainstream you can find them refrigerated right next to the dairy milk. I guess Americans prefer to buy milk that way.
Re: wine. Interestingly in the US, due to the fact liquor laws are regulated by the state, when you cross state lines your supermarket alcohol selection will vary drastically. Some states ban alcohol sales in supermarkets entirely. Some allow only beer and wine. Some allow only beer only. Some allow beer, wine, and liquor. I've never heard of a state that banned beer but allowed liquor but who knows, it's possible. It mind boggling just how many crazy (and different) regulations about silly stuff like this exists around alcohol in the US. Funny story, a friend of mine went to a supermarket outside of the state she lived in and was totally mystified she couldn't find Bacardi's. "I've never been to a grocery store that didn't have Bacardi's" She didn't know they weren't allowed to sell it there.
Personally, I'm in a "beer only" state and and wine coolers and malt liquor (colloquially known as "40s") are categorized as "beer."
I once has breakfast on a real dairy farm, they got their milk from the tank right after milking. After drinking milk that was in the cow just 3 hours before I cannot stand milk you can buy. I cannot say if this is because it was never pasteurized, or just that is was fresh, but the flavor was better.
Note, do not take the above as advocacy for unpasteurized milk. The risks are real enough.
It used to be that Google Now obeyed your browser choice when opening links. When it started forcing chrome, I had to actually uninstall chrome in order to make it use firefox to open the news article tiles it presents to me.
What I actually want for this sort of problem is a browser extension that allows me to annotate domains in some way, and then treats links differently based on that. This is a half-baked idea; I have no time to make this, so I haven't been thinking about it much. (Please steal the idea!) But perhaps a way to quickly tag domain names - 'annoying popup', 'spammer', 'dead to me', etc., and then indicate the tags visually next to links/change the colors/something like that, so I can more easily avoid sites that annoy me.
Sadly, if "give it away for free and make money from advertising" is the dominant business model in an industry, it's very hard to disrupt. That's precisely because there aren't really any sustainable incentives for users to switch to a different model.
If one experience is awful and one is pleasant but 50c more then most aren't going to notice the difference.
Not to mention the effects on the advertiser, being disrupted from what I'm doing to see your ad makes me not want to see your movie.
For theatre's over reliance on advertising has already turned a lot of people away. We've all made and heard complaints about 20 minutes of advertising before a movie starts. The only thing they've got going for them anymore is timed exclusivity.
For what it's worth, I'm with you. I'd rather pay a small fee to avoid ads (and I do so whenever available.) But I've come to the sad conclusion that we are a small minority of consumers. Better to accept that than fall prey to the is-ought fallacy.
They don't really save time, as you need to show up early for a seat in most places.
The plumbing guys are dumb, but you don't know the business... of they are a local outfit they have a someone captive audience who can be abused a bit.
Their web site is for them to make money and considering that these practices exist, I have a feeling that they make more money by ad-sales than by actual sales of their actual product.
Long-term this is obviously a bad strategy, but who knows whether they even are interested in a long-term strategy.
If you visit to any "guide" website like TripAdviser, Yelp, etc, these days on a mobile browser, you'll notice that the sites often barely let you do anything without downloading the native app. They all but refuse to let you see content and throw up "Download our app!" pop-ups everywhere.
By traditional logic, that seems insane. Why are they putting so many roadblocks between the user and the content? Surely that must be driving away users, right?
The reason for this behavior is that Google is systematically destroying the SEO traffic of these sites by adding their own competitive features to search result pages that appear above organic results.
If you search for a restaurant / hotel / flight on your phone, Google will often show its own custom widgets above the organic search results. It's not unusual that zero organic search results are visible "above the fold". The more Google does this, the more the share of clicks goes to them instead of to organic search results in these types of searches.
That means that even if these guide companies have #1 search rankings for every possible search term, they are seeing their SEO traffic plummet every month because they can't compete with Google's "above #1 result" placement. So as a defensive move, some companies are basically giving up on SEO traffic in the long term and trying to forcefully convert many visitors as possible into users who visit directly via a native app (and thus bypass Google). They know that every web user who doesn't download the native app is ever less likely to ever find them again via a search result page.
So to these companies, they see this change from Google as another anti-competitive move because Google is taking away one of their last remaining lifelines for user acquisition.
Personally, I find those full-page ads super annoying and hate them too and think they should go away. But like anything complicated, this isn't a simple black and white move to benefit users. It's also a strategic move that helps Google and hurts some competitors.
I always thought AMP was a way to get some visibility into Facebook sharing traffic.
People don't use bookmarks, especially on mobile phones. Not many people are going to bookmark hostelworld.com and when looking for a hostel, they're not going to click the bookmark and search on hostelworld. They're going to Google search for "hostels in XYZ", and hostelworld will be there, underneath Google's own recommendations.
With the app though, the icon is conveniently sitting there on the home screen. You're probably getting less new users by giving on on web, but the users that you do get using your app are going to be much more loyal.
Everyone panicked and good old email is trustworthy. FB holds the contacts in their paid garden that they once so hard fought for.
How does one counter the argument that "anecdotal evidence suggests people who sign up with us are 2x more likely to convert, so let's force more sign ups to increase revenue".
But it's easier for them to extrapolate data and say, hey, we couldn't get emails of xxx thousand users, so we lost xxx amount, vs our argument that they probably lost a number of users who were annoyed by the popup.
Except, you can count conversions, but you can't "measure annoyance"
Remember, the aggregators originally dethroned the travel agencies as the 'experts' in connecting people with what they want. Google search is in the business of providing information, meaning if they have the info available they'll provide an aggregated list of restaurants to someone who wants restaurants.
Google has a long and storied history (since Dejanews) of fucking up user generated content on google properties.
If you're looking for restaurants and hotels, TripAdvisor and Yelp are exponentially better than anything Google is going to give you.
I stopped using Yelp the minute they made their mobile site unusable in a pinch while pulled over on the side of the road. It doesn't matter how good the content is if I don't have the time to jump through their hoops.
That's the point - that these businesses are providing enough information to allow Google to aggregate them for a user with intent, rather than just pass the user off to another website aggregator.
The reason for this behavior is that Google is systematically destroying the SEO traffic of these sites
Most people don't pay attention to the overbroad spectrum of access many apps demand.
Specific example: Samsung changed the Gallery app (default on my GS7 to display photos from within the Camera app) to demand access to my Calendar. If I hit Deny, it aborts. My Calendar? Really?
There are one or two apps I use that do require extra permissions to function – like the NFL Sunday Ticket app won't work unless I enable location services, because it needs to black-out local games due to broadcast rights.
Some things are simply not available on iOS. For example, your app can't get a list of other apps you have installed, or send/receive text messages.
Of course, every once in a while someone finds a way to abuse a different API maliciously. Apple had to limit the availability of the API used to determine if a URL scheme can be handled by the device because Twitter was spamming it to determine what apps you had installed (if your device can open a 'dominospizza://' link, they knew you had the Dominos app installed). So now you have to whitelist up to 50 URL schemes your app might try to launch.
Of course there are plenty of safe apps that do not abuse APIs - for example, the Deliveries app by JuneCloud.
And Google is the king of that.
While you make a good point - it's not like Google can take the high road on this.
All I care about is the quality of my browsing experience, which takes a nosedive every time one of these fullscreen mobile ads shows up. As long as Google's algorithm ranks results roughly in the order of how useful and pleasant they are to me - even if that's just a side-effect of their own self-interested intentions - I'm OK. In general I'm not a big fan of egoist philosophy, but in this case, all I care about is me, me, me. Google should keep doing what they're doing.
It might be dictatorial, but the web has so few incentives to not load your website down with a ratchet of ever-increasing invasive crap, that any incentive pushing in the opposite direction is good, and Google is one of the only agents with the might to make that happen.
In the short run, it won't matter, but in the long run, it may likely affect your browsing experience on the whole.
Google doesn't do anything well but search. So you are trading a slightly better search experience - which may cost you the death of several brands that provide much more than search outcomes.
Trip Advisor, Yelp etc. ostensibly provide a useful service, beyond whatever Google will do. So when those companies go, we lose those greater services.
The impact of Google's monopoly is something we cannot ignore.
It's like 80% of Russians still support Putin, because he 'seems strong' - but Russians also don't realize how much he has de-facto degraded their standard of living. Russians would be a lot wealthier if they integrated into global markets, stop invading neighbouring territories. There'd be massive growth and opportunity for Russians - at least in globalist terms.
I beg to differ. Google also provides great products for - Maps, Email, Browser, Mobile OS, Video, Photo management. If you think neither of those are great and you can think of a better alternative, you have a lot of market share to capture.
Having said that, I concur with the rest of your sentiment and would like to see services like TripAdvisor, Kayak etc flourish.
Disclaimer: hold a lot of GOOG
They're still the best in the game - but that doesn't mean they're still doing it well. Just better than the competition.
* "term A" is in the body, and "term B" is in the navlinks but has no bearing on "term A". Google search sees that the body includes both terms and include it in the results.
You will care when nobody's in the business of providing hotel/restaurant/etc reviews...except Google.
I think we can all agree that these types of overlays are terrible for users. And there are alternatives, like banners and static inline suggestions to download the app. I don't mind when sites put a "Read More" button that does little more than unhide some content, why not do the same thing to invite users to your app?
This is the key point of SEO nowadays. Google basically awards you if you: 1) provide good (better) content 2) have good UX
I think the point was: be mad at both :)
Who the hell goes on a shitty site with annoying ads and decides, hey, I want a dedicated spot on my home screen for this shitty service.
It is to me. Any page that greets me with large pop-ups and "Download our app" messages can sink into obscurity, for all I care. I'm not going to download just any app and trying to force me by making your site deliberately shitty will only make me angry at you. I realy hope this move from google includes sides that slide in a ("get our app!")-banner after a few seconds, just right so I accidantely click the banner instead of the link I wanted to click.
The penalty must not apply because:
> They're displayed when the user leaves a page, rather than when they arrive on one, so the user doesn’t have to wait for them to load
One G product can affect another it seems.
It is worth bearing in mind that not all sites are reliant on google traffic, so more cash from Adsense at a hit on ranking may mean more £ and zero traffic impact.
I don't mind a few ads, but many of these interstitials are downright maliciously designed, making the entire page load consistent on hitting a tiny "x" target, presumably designed with the intention of facilitating accidental clicks on the ad.
"Would you like to search and browse the mobile web through Google? Only if you disable your ad blocker."
I'd be shocked if they don't try to force AMP on the desktop as well next if this works out for them.
So if someone decides AMP pages should be blocked, your ad blocker will start blocking them.
It's actually one of the reasons I stopped using them. The idea of some person somewhere deciding what I see and don't see didn't quite jive with me. And it was impacting me by blocking things like Google shopping which I was trying to use.
I also never really liked the idea of blocking ads, depriving content creators of money, and I don't want to always pay for everything with money.
That, combined with the lack of easy control, opinionated ad blocking utilities (stop blocking webRTC dammit. I know you think it's a problem, I don't), general breakage across the web, performance issues with most blockers, and more made me stop using them.
Too bad AMP won't work with it, but there's no way I'm disabling it as life before content blockers on iOS was hell. (Sites hijacking you to the app store, etc.)
For more open ended queries, of course, the fuzziness can be helpful. And I would assume that the typical Google search is going to benefit more from the latter approach.
(also, not sure if the GP is in some test or something, but date range and verbatim are still there for me on desktop and mobile)
For example, let's say I've seen a page on the Internet one year ago, and I remember the title and some text. Sometimes, it isn't possible for Google to return that site with any search.
There is also the perpetual search problem for computer science related material, where a major set of the search term is single letters, unsearchable symbols, or very common words.
But supposedly, Google is always getting better, even if this is not a problem I've seen before. I guess the Internet is just degrading then?
I'm afraid a search engine so much specialized won't be able to live off ads.
like a buck or two a month billed anually I would buy without hesitation if I believed it had real value.
I usually search github directly now for these things, and it works decently well; either finding the code in the repo to which it belongs or better yet, an issue addressed by the developer.
I totally read this as "Google Has Started Penalizing Mobile Websites… [by using the penalty of imposed] Intrusive Pop-Up Ads" instead of "…penalizing those websites that use Intrusive Pop-Up Ads"
Edit: I am new to HN, why this was downvoted?
(why are you being downvoted? No idea, you make a reasonable, articulate statement, with a credible explanation. Sometimes it just happens on HN. I like to assume people are accidentally clicking the [▼] character by mistake).
Maybe it's just me, but I think I hate those things more than anything else on the current web. Maybe even more than autoplay videos.
Of the people who see the pop up, the conversion rate is highest for those who see it immediately. And there's not a significant effect on bounce rates.
I have no idea why! I would never simply give my email address to an immediate pop up modal.
We are power users, a lot of people have no idea what they're doing on the web.
Why isn't there an option to disable it in Chrome is beyond me.
The browser has become a sandbox for hostile actors, and it seems like a terrible idea to make that sandbox larger.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Vibration_A...
And the conflict of interest is possibly anti-trust level. (IANAL)
A company that gets the majority of their revenue from ads is penalizing sites in their near-monopoly search results for showing the "wrong" ads.
massive abuse of power. It's amazing that the company that controls most internet advertising, also controls which websites are blacklisted by the vast majority of browsers.
Not using adsense? Maybe we blacklist that website until they use adsense! :)
And the biggest problem is, there is no oversight, or communication or recourse. If your website gets blocked, you won't know why, and will just have to click a "reconsider" button to ask Google to see if it's acceptable now.
Not to mention they said they were going to do this back in August. So far that hasn't "made" Quora, Yelp, or Pinterest stop doing anything.
Do not allow yourself to be bullied. Yes, services have some nonzero value but your time also has tremendous value and you should not undersell it by putting up with stupid crap. Any site that shoves things in your face is being disrespectful, it is wasting your time, and it is costing you, which is not OK. Let those sites die out.
"In short, if a web page puposely hides content behind an ad or forces interaction with an ad"
Does this mean that it doesn't include those nauseating "follow us/sign up for our newsletter" light boxes that plague the web now?
Also why would this only be for mobile? Are they any less of a scourge for desktops?
Despite a few UI differences switching to Firefox on mobile with ublock has been excellent.
They got the approach from attending an online marketing workshop that suggested this increases their list.
Felt like a bit of an anti-pattern to me.
Anyone have advice as to if this is effective or if it will be affected by today's announcement?
Thanks for the discussion everyone.
Ref: https://www.sharetribe.com/academy/how-to-communicate-your-v...
(They are apparently mandatory in the European Union and Google made them part of the Adwords rules some time ago.)
"By contrast, here are some examples of techniques that, used responsibly, would not be affected by the new signal:
Interstitials that appear to be in response to a legal obligation, such as for cookie usage or for age verification."
The headline was confusing. Google has started using intrusive pop-up ads to penalize mobile sites? This writing has clarity issues.
>Web pages need ads to operate, but...
Plenty of web pages (websites?) are operated without ads, out of love for a topic, desire to build a name, or other reasons. Web pages don't NEED ads. Well some have been built to rely on them, and can only survive with ads, but certainly not all web pages.
Aside from that and the headline, great level of detail in this article about the exceptions, the general sizes, and the rollout.
I also wonder how google distinguishes between things like floating nav bars and elements that obscure content.
Has anyone here done any AB testing on it and have some numbers?
Chrome FAQ currently says: "Chrome apps and extensions are currently not supported on Chrome for Android. We have no plans to announce at this time." https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/faq
Recently used Ola's (Uber's main competitor in India) native app on android, and right when you're about to book a pool ride, at times, they'll show you a full page interstitial advertising pool rides. And if that wasn't ridiculous already, they provide no way to cancel the popup. The only way to proceed is by clicking "Try share".
And when you do so, it throws a generic "Uh Oh, Something went wrong error", and you're basically stuck without a ride.
Popups, while effective, are being overused, which means they will become less and less effective.
On top of that, too many are poorly created and don't work on mobile, making it difficult to impossible to close out. This is unfortunate.
I've long held that we need a less intrusive "popup" that nudges instead of disrupts users. Basically a Hello Bar style that while catching my attention is something I can easily ignore.
Of course, I agree with you in principle.
Furthermore, most paywalled sites seem to deliver a non-paywall version to Google servers and when coming from Google search explicitly to avoid this happening.
What content is that? It costs money to host/serve that content at the very minimum.
If it's videos like youtube, etc.. .the content creators absolutely get paid. Most people's blogs have ads to help offset hosting costs.
There might be a few select examples - but in general, somebody's got to pay the bills.
How many articles that HN posters discuss were written for free, have no ads on the site/blog, nor are behind a paywall, nor have some ulterior motive for the content (recognition, advertising/promotion, etc)?
Patronage model may be more important for most content types than traditional paywalls, though for some types of content (news, particularly) the interest bias the patronage model creates may be contrary to quality.
Google would argue that visitors coming via search aren't paywalled, but often that isn't true. Some give you 3 free views, for example, then cut you off.
To me, if you want a paywall, that's fine...But then your content shouldn't show up on search engines, or perhaps if it does, it should be clearly marked as such.
There are many ways to get paid for your work without using a bait-and-switch method where you show google a different page than the one you are showing to your users.
The inherent problem is that app experiences somehow lead to better conversions, and no company would want to lose revenue due to dropped install numbers.
On smaller devices they pop up the App download every time you visit. So I had already stopped browsing Reddit on my phone.
I'm all for responsive web and apps when they add value. And I know responsive web on complicated sites can be a challenge, but if 50% of web traffic is mobile now, what does it do to a sites traffic if the mobile experience is terrible?
- penalty for non no-js fallback
I guess as long as it's for "good" reasons.
edit: would any downvoters care to explain how google being able to arbitrarily dictate web content is a power they should have?
So why is Google beholden to deliver traffic to websites that use obtrusive popup ads when Google's users don't like it? Is Google somehow morally obligated to ensure a website's revenue model isn't disturbed when trying to provide a better experience for their users?
This particular change doesn't irk me, but the one where they penalized for too many "above the fold" ads did bother me..because Google is the king of above-the-fold ads in search results. Similar for penalties for "duplicate content", which is exactly what their kg/widget program is doing...scraping other people's content.
So, as long they as practice as they preach, it seems reasonable.
would any downvoters care to explain how google being able to
arbitrarily dictate web content is a power they should have?
If there weren't any monopoly issues in play, there would be no question of Google's behaviour at all.
As it is, there are potentially monopoly issues in play, but in this instance, Google are simply penalising sites that provide a poor UX, which is a reasonable position for a search engine to take: prioritise the sites which provide the best value to visitors.
As an end-user, I would like duck-duck-go, bing, yahoo, and every other search engine, to penalise sites that use popups in this way.
Because that's literally how search engines work. They look at hundreds of metrics to try to return the most useful result.
If you want a metric-free search engine, you might as well ctrl+f for a list of the world's domains, because anything else will have subjectivity involved.