I’m wondering how much this will alter http://experts-exchange.com 's rank. Although the questions are above the fold the vast majority of the content is well under the fold (for the purpose of hiding it, and getting you to pay.)
It seems like this change is directly aimed at eliminating that tactic...
It probably won't do them any good. And they're already doing poorly: I, at least, almost never see them anywhere near the top of my results. And I almost never bother scrolling down to later results either.
The first question that came to my mind was: How do they know what is an ad and what is just a heavily graphical site that is exactly what the user was looking for?
If they're virtually rendering the page and looking at how much page area is covered by content from known ad networks (including Google Ads, I trust) then that's one thing. If they're looking for lots of nice, Google-friendly text and just discarding images, Flash, etc, then that's another thing entirely.
This is a solved-problem, every ad-blocking add-on already does this. I don't think Google of all companies is returning a lot of false positives in their algorithm.
I do not think it is relevant to separating ads from useful content. They are probably just calculating place of content which is relevant to search keywords in the screen. This would works for images and other graphical content too.
I wonder how much the in-house expertise of developing Chrome is contributing to the GoogleBot analysis stuff. Having people who aren't afraid to go knee deep in WebKit and produce some nice fast library for partially evaluating layouts, etc, is probably quite a nice thing.
As one of the sibling comments here mentions, ad detection is a pretty well-solved problem by now, through size, position and origin matches. The interesting part here I think is how they're actually doing the 'virtual rendering' (and presumably, reflowing it for each of their mentioned typical browser resolutions) to check what's actually 'above the fold'.
I think google is going about this the wrong way. They are claiming its a bad user experience for the search term to be down on the page or not have any content at the top but (1) that is far too generic a statement to make and (2) it is not Google's responsibility to make sure pages align to a certain design standard. They are essentially adding design requirements into their search algorithm. This restricts the design of any webpage that wants to optimize its Google ranking.
I can't count the number of times I've googled something, clicked on a promising result and immediately hit ctrl-f to re-search the resulting page for what I was looking for. Often it is either hard to find or not really there in general. Maybe its a link to somewhere else, or a partial text from another article, or simply 5 pages down due to a horrible layout.
Anything google can do to reduce this terrible UX is worthwhile.
Ultimately Google is making a stand for user of it's search (Who they make money off of) by providing what the user wants. Which is easier and quicker access to information.
If your primary business model is free content, ad supported, and rely on google as your search engine, you don't have much of a choice.
Right or wrong, your business model is Google dependent, and you are held hostage. If you don't like that, it's time to find another business model.
(Google being a monopoly is another issue, but no search engine is required to carry your content for discovery (yet, who knows what congress will throw at the wall next year))
Ah, but it is Google's job to make sure the pages are well designed. The top-level goal of a search engine is to deliver the best results possible. Once a result is sufficiently relevant, the quality of the site matters. Given two sites equally relevant to my query, I definitely want Google to prefer the well-designed one over an annoying, ad-ridden mess that's hard to read.
There is nothing wrong with restricting the design of a webpage aiming for a good Google ranking: as long as it results in better websites rising in the results, it's a good thing.
This reads a bit like hyperbole, this is just another ranking factor in an ocean of ranking factors. To react to this news by redesigning all your sites using this ranking factor as your primary focus would be a mistake.
Google's objective here is to reduce the ranking of bad quality ad ridden sites that attempt to serve as middle men between search results and a sale, low quality made for adsense sites. Anything google does to help rank these lower is good in my books.
Danny Sullivan really makes a nice job however this usually is not the case, imo. Generally, Google's result page does not contain so much ad. In most cases which result page contain too much ad, ads might be even more relevant than natural results.
This is right in line with last years announcement that Google will penalize slow sites. In my experience, there is significant overlap between slow load times and sites heavy on the banner ads...
What percentage of users is Google considering for 'above the fold' and are they just penalizing for ad content or do logos, images and header junk get penalized as well?
For example, the WordPress TwentyEleven theme as seen in http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/ shows the first article header at the 50% threshold, buried below the generous header and image banner. Would a site based on this theme or a similar design face a penalty?
As posted in one of the blog post's comments. I suggest you do this:
- Open a new tab, google search "credit cards" and...
...all of your results, but one, are ads (I'm using a 11' MacBook air). My suggestion would be to do a tighter integration of Google's website user experience research into their search engine user experience design.
I hope this won't favor short sites where all the content fits above the fold compared to long, solid articles or q&a-site questions with several replies. Stackoverflow for example often requires scrolling to reach an answer because the question itself is so long.
[+] [-] nmcfarl|14 years ago|reply
It seems like this change is directly aimed at eliminating that tactic...
[+] [-] nostromo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] llz|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tikhonj|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Silhouette|14 years ago|reply
If they're virtually rendering the page and looking at how much page area is covered by content from known ad networks (including Google Ads, I trust) then that's one thing. If they're looking for lots of nice, Google-friendly text and just discarding images, Flash, etc, then that's another thing entirely.
[+] [-] MatthewPhillips|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avsaro|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shabble|14 years ago|reply
As one of the sibling comments here mentions, ad detection is a pretty well-solved problem by now, through size, position and origin matches. The interesting part here I think is how they're actually doing the 'virtual rendering' (and presumably, reflowing it for each of their mentioned typical browser resolutions) to check what's actually 'above the fold'.
[+] [-] Pound6F|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbell|14 years ago|reply
I can't count the number of times I've googled something, clicked on a promising result and immediately hit ctrl-f to re-search the resulting page for what I was looking for. Often it is either hard to find or not really there in general. Maybe its a link to somewhere else, or a partial text from another article, or simply 5 pages down due to a horrible layout.
Anything google can do to reduce this terrible UX is worthwhile.
[+] [-] mey|14 years ago|reply
If your primary business model is free content, ad supported, and rely on google as your search engine, you don't have much of a choice.
Right or wrong, your business model is Google dependent, and you are held hostage. If you don't like that, it's time to find another business model.
(Google being a monopoly is another issue, but no search engine is required to carry your content for discovery (yet, who knows what congress will throw at the wall next year))
[+] [-] tikhonj|14 years ago|reply
There is nothing wrong with restricting the design of a webpage aiming for a good Google ranking: as long as it results in better websites rising in the results, it's a good thing.
[+] [-] TomGullen|14 years ago|reply
Google's objective here is to reduce the ranking of bad quality ad ridden sites that attempt to serve as middle men between search results and a sale, low quality made for adsense sites. Anything google does to help rank these lower is good in my books.
[+] [-] WillyF|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avsaro|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cullenking|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mutagen|14 years ago|reply
For example, the WordPress TwentyEleven theme as seen in http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/ shows the first article header at the 50% threshold, buried below the generous header and image banner. Would a site based on this theme or a similar design face a penalty?
[+] [-] alexchamberlain|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JangoSteve|14 years ago|reply
Will this very negatively impact sites such as Twitter's Hogan JS? http://twitter.github.com/hogan.js/
[+] [-] TomGullen|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nader|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carlsednaoui|14 years ago|reply
- Open a new tab, google search "credit cards" and...
...all of your results, but one, are ads (I'm using a 11' MacBook air). My suggestion would be to do a tighter integration of Google's website user experience research into their search engine user experience design.
[+] [-] Too|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexchamberlain|14 years ago|reply