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Comment by rquirk | Hacker News Reader

Google showing adverts on google.com/search is one thing, but I think the real metric to look at is usage of the Google advert network on the sites themselves. The more googlesyndication.com or doubleclick.net on a site, the spammier it is.

The problem is that Google can't penalize a site for using these technologies. And not because Google makes money from sites using these adverts, which they do, but because it'd be an arms race. The guys taking advantage of SEO would catch on and change advertisers. Google could penalize other advert networks too (Bing say), but then they'd be open to accusations of anti-competitive behavior.

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It would be interesting to know the proportion of Google ad revenue between displaying ads on its own properties (search, but also Gmail, etc.) and networks of ads on external content.

The reason why spam exists is because people make money from it. If AdSense is the problem, how much would it hurt to just drop it?

Certainly another system would appear, but then Google could discriminate against any website with ads on it without being accused of being unfair to competitors.

69% and 31%. It's in their SEC filings.

If Google discriminated against websites with ads on it, their SERP quality would drop.

Thanks for the info.

But how would SERP quality drop if pages without ads received a boost?

Many high quality sites have ads, but not all. Yet all spam sites have ads (or else what's the point of spamming).

So by discriminating against pages with ads, you eliminate spam at the (possible) cost of hurting a little legitimate sites with ads.

This should be testable.

Not all spam sites have ads. Many online stores are quite spammy, for example, and they only promote stuff they sell themselves. On the other hand, would you consider Wikipedia's huge Jimbo Wales banners as ads?

ExpertsExchange (sells subscriptions) or StackOverflow (funded by ads) ?

Good point, but ExpertsExchange has ads too. It also behaves in a spammy way, burying the answers at the very end of the page. That should be detectable behavior.

I bet there's a lot of things that spam pages have in common with regards to things like page placement.

So, if Google gets better at quantifying "spammy-ness" there will be an initial drop in spam effectiveness, but then spammers would catch on and emulate the behavior of good pages.

Eventually, the spammers' behavior would be indistinguishable from genuine posters.

http://xkcd.com/810/

Some spam sites are simply for PageRank. No ads, just links.

They wouldn't use such a "metric" because it'd be completely useless, not for some other reasons you just made up. The homepage of the NY Times uses AdSense, for example.

I think you could form some kind of metric out of a) number of AdSense placements b) prominence of AdSense placements. There should be nothing against using AdSense, as long as the ads are secondary to (informative) content.

> the real metric to look at is usage of the Google advert network on the sites themselves

Right, that's what AdSense is. That probably should have been made explicit though since a lot of folks miss the distinction between AdWords and AdSense.

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