Pages With Too Many Ads Above The Fold Now Penalized By Google
searchengineland.com
searchengineland.com
http://www.google.com/search?btnG=1&pws=0&q=breast+r...
There are 11 paid links and 10 organic. At least 75% of the above-the-fold content is ads.
I think Google likes me :P
I'm guessing google thinks you won't get breast reduction.
I don't really know what this implies in terms of ads, but I'm not complaining ;)
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2122137/Googlebot-Learn...
It also grabs CSS and has for years.
Here's a link where they show the UA for the Google Web Preview crawler: http://www.webmasterworld.com/search_engine_spiders/4353651....
I believe this crawler renders your pages for the preview snippets you get in search results when you hover over the arrow that appears on the right side of a result.
The previews I've seen would only look that way if javascript was being rendered and allowed to run for ~10-20s by my estimation--based on the progress of an animation that was previewed.
If you don't like it, use Yahoo!.
> If you don't like it, use Yahoo!.
Thanks for the tip, but I prefer DuckDuckGo.
(I really hope this doesn't derail one of the few non-SOPA threads. But that's the most relevant motivation I can think of for this change.)
Really? You think "a sneaky way to penalize pirate sites" is a more relevant motivation than "help users find information more easily by trying to filter out sites that have so many ads they obscure content"?
So you're under the assumption that Google implemented every quality-related change to the core ranking algorithms - every change they ever wanted - 5 years ago, and now they just sit around and react to politics.
Gotcha.
Eventually Google itself will be showing "too many ads above the fold". Does anyone doubt it?
Gaming the search engine to be numero uno on the SERP is one thing. But proclaming a penalty for websites that have "too many ads"? That seems like it's for users to decide, not Google. Not to mention hypocritical. Can we penalise Google for "too many ads"?
When Google sends me to the worst of these kinds of sites, I become extremely annoyed...at Google. So yes, we can and should "penalize" Google, but on metrics like quality of results (which includes the ads being shown). In an ideal world I'm replacing having to separate the wheat from the chaff of the entire internet with having to separate the wheat from the chaff of the search engine market, and I'm going to favor a search engine that does a better job.
In other words, as a user, "since Google is a website that uses ads, and they're going to favor websites that use fewer ads, aren't they hypocritical?" is not a question I care about even a little.
What I do care about, among other things, is having a search engine that doesn't show me useless crap.
Neither is something the search engine can fix for you.
With respect to the later idea, the search engine may in fact be contributing to it by encouraging more crap to be created, because it easily percolates to the top of their "intelligent" results and users blindly click on result #1. And no doubt many users see these results as equivalent to "the web". Whatever Google returns, to them, that's "the web".
You can think about the web through the lense of "search engine results" and evaluate the web based on whatever is returned from your search engine queries.
Or you can think of the web as a huge mess of websites some of which are useful, most of which are crap and many of which an aggressive search engine might index.
Are you evaluating search results, or websites?
I'm evaluating websites, individually. Because that is what the web is. To me, Google is not the web. Google might give me some clues about some sites. They do an enormous amount of grunt work crawling them.
But it's up to me to do the final evaluation. To decide whether a site is useful or whether it is crap.
And there are other ways to discover websites besides using Google. How do you think Google learns about existing and new websites? Voluntary disclosure by the webmasters?
It sounds like you want someone to evaluate websites for you. I doubt you are alone in that regard.
This is not a new problem.
However, unlike you, I do not see Google as providing any viable solution.
No, it means the ranking algorithm is evaluating the results wrongly. Which is what they're trying to fix.
With respect to the later idea, the search engine may in fact be contributing to it by encouraging more crap to be created, because it easily percolates to the top of their "intelligent" results and users blindly click on result #1. And no doubt many users see these results as equivalent to "the web". Whatever Google returns, to them, that's "the web".
But that's the point, isn't it? It shouldn't easily percolate to the top. That's what their algorithms are for. If it does, they need to be fixed.
Are you evaluating search results, or websites?
I'm evaluating websites, individually. Because that is what the web is. To me, Google is not the web. Google might give me some clues about some sites. They do an enormous amount of grunt work crawling them.
But it's up to me to do the final evaluation. To decide whether a site is useful or whether it is crap.
I don't get what you mean by "Google being the web". Of course the final evaluation is up to the user. But if Google can rank the results more like you would, you're wasting less time clicking through the crap to get what you want.
And there are other ways to discover websites besides using Google. How do you think Google learns about existing and new websites? Voluntary disclosure by the webmasters?
Actually, they do that too. But mostly by painstakingly loading every link recursively, something which is obviously impossible for a person to do unless they want to be limited to 0.0...01% of the web.
a crappy page with nothing but ads is going to get clicks, and since Google is the #1 ad network, it means more money for Google.
if Google organic search results were perfect, people would never click on the ads. the worse the results are, the more likely the ads are better and you get trained to click... and ker-ching!
Google needs to be good enough to (i) discourage mass defection to Bing and Duck-Duck-Go, (ii) not produce public outrage as happened when A list bloggers were getting outranked by duplicate content, and (iii) not get in trouble for anti-trust. (Hint: if you want to run a spam farm, buy a second or third tier search engine.
Sounds like the author needs to go through the process of correctly setting up his monitors using the Apple provided tool in System Preferences, I have absolutely no problem seeing the yellow box in Google's search results.
The color yellow in that screenshot is very faint. It's HTML color #fef5e4, which is 10% yellow and little else.
Then I compared it with the ad background on a live SEPR, which was rendered as #fff, aka 100% white.
Sounds like the author was right.
To me that yellow stands out extremely well, I have no trouble seeing it.
The background in Google's CSS for that div with id "tads" is: #FDF6E5
This is for the search "credit cards":
The background colour is still the same. I just asked around the office if anyone was misled regarding these ads and no-one else seems to be unable to see the yellow or have trouble seeing it in general.
If you're seeing a gold-ish yellow background, then your monitor is set to low brightness or Gamma 2.2. That way, you won't see colors as they are.
Mac OS X used to be the lone hold-out at 1.8 gamma but those days are long gone. (Snow Leopard changed the default to 2.2 to be in-line with the rest of the industry). Windows has always been at 2.2 gamma.