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joelrunyon

Google's "quality guidelines" prohibits scraping other sites and covering the first half of your site with ads.

Google's results these days tend to scrape the information from most sites + list ads on >50% of the listings page.

Really frustrating when Google doesn't even follow their own guidelines.

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That's because those guidelines aren't meant for them.

Google is saying that if you don't follow their guidelines, you "shouldn't" be included in their search results. They aren't saying you are committing some kind of atrocity, just that pages that do that provide bad results from searches.

Of course google doesn't want scraped results showing up in their search results. Would you want your search engine to show results from other search engines which show results from other search engines which show results from a page with a snippet which points to the real source?

They aren't "not following their own rules" any more than a train is braking the rules by being on the tracks in spite of the "stay off the train tracks" sign.

From Google's post about the "too many ads above the fold" update:

"As we’ve mentioned previously, we’ve heard complaints from users that if...it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away"[1]

So, they recognize pages that are heavy with ads at the top, which push down the actual content, aren't a good user experience. That's exactly what I get when I search Google...a bunch of ads or other self-serving stuff on top, that pushes down the content (actual organic results) that I'm looking for.

[1]https://search.googleblog.com/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-...

To me the ads are the content as well. Often times the tip search result is the same as the top advertisement.

Google doesn't make that distinction for sites though. The ranking penalty applies even if the top heavy ads are highly related and complimentary to your content.

My mother has exactly one way to get to the Nordstrom e-commerce site: search Google for Nordstrom, and then click on the first authoritative-looking Nordstrom search result, which is an AdWords ad, landing her at the home page.

Seems expensive for Nordstrom.

Would a browser extension that just moved AdWords to the bottom of the page be banned from the chrome web store?

I'm sort of tempted to try this, but if so I guess I should start backing up my gmail account...

Tried this on a few search result pages, seems reliable so far.

document.getElementById('center_col').appendChild(document.getElementById('tvcap'));

Are adblockers blocked from the Chrome store?

Desktop extensions aren't, but perhaps GP is remembering a similar situation with mobile ad blockers and the Play Store. https://techcrunch.com/2016/02/09/google-reverses-its-decisi...

Some are, usually youtube api abusers. They try to walk the line pretty well with their TOS.

It is - but if they don't Neiman Marcus will bid for that term instead and come up as the top result.

1. Nordstrom would rather pay to keep the customer

2. Google charges a fraction for bidding on your own brand/website.

A woman in her sixties Googling for "nordstrom" is a Nordstrom customer.

Sooner or later the new middleman will always start to behave like the old middleman. Before it was the yellow pages, now it's google.

Of course. That's why I said "keep" and not acquire. What I meant is Nordstrom would rather pay Google to not lose the customer to some other site because of the placement of ads on Google.

This isn't by accident. Google has engineered it so that companies have to buy PPC ads for their own search results, to avoid 'competitive' PPC from rival brands.

True, but it isn't to maximize profit.

Ad bids are multiplied by a quality score which represents how useful the user will find the ad to be. An ad for the company searched for will be very useful to the user, therefore having a very high quality score, therefore the advertiser pays very little to have the top spot.

A competitor on the other hand would get a low quality score, and have to bid a lot to get the top spot.

It absolutely is to maximize profit - it's to extract surplus PPC budget out of businesses. Not a huge surplus no, but a surplus nonetheless.

G knows the boardroom shitstorm that ensues when a CEO Google's the company name and sees a competitor outranking them (& that it looks like an organic result).

There's therefore tremendous incentive for brands to park some 'defensive' PPC budget (and it's never clear precisely how much you need to be spending and of course your spend will be anchored by your spend on generics), and a lot of incentive for other brands to try to outbid (even if the net effect of those ads is as display ads snd they don't attract clicks).

Consumers meanwhile, will just click the first 'paid' link, meaning that G is getting 30c for a link click the brand previously would have got for free.

Well, with google crafting more and more answers from other people's content, you could argue they're getting into the content game.

That's sort of breaking with their original social contract that they were just a discovery tool - which is what the entire article is about.

Is "social contract" code for "agreement I wish existed"? Because it's only used in occasions where no such agreement actually exists.

Some may have expected Google to remain just a discovery tool. That doesn't mean Google owed them to do so.

It's code for "agreement that everybody thought existed, despite not being written."

I don't think this one social contract actually existed.

It might not be everybody.

Have you tried searching for a phone number? What you described is pretty much what the search results look like.

That's why I put the quotes around "shouldn't".

They can't make sure that none of them get in, but their guidelines are just warning that they may "wise up" at some point and if you break those guidelines you may find your site un-findable in google because of it.

I noticed just how bad it was last week when looking at wedding bands.

http://imgur.com/a/9Yz5M

Top 4 results plus the entire right half are all sponsored content. There was only one link shown on the without scrolling which wasn't sponsored.

Crap like this is why ad blockers are popular.

That's what we have Ad Limiter for.[1] It trims Google's sponsored results down to one ad. For some subjects (try "credit card") the entire first screen from Google is ads.

[1] http://www.adlimiter.com

You're searching for products though. All of those ads meet the criteria of your search.

Surely Google follows their own guidelines: You can't find Google Search Engine results indexed on Google itself (or any other search engine with or without ads for that matter). Google Search is more of an application than a content site.

Otherwise, when Google finds itself breaking the "rules", they act:

- Google banned the page for Chrome for buying paid links

- Google banned an acquired company (Beatthatquote) for violating rules.

- Google penalized their Adwords FAQ pages for cloaking.

- Google reduced pagerank for Google Japan for buying links.

- Google removed Adwords support pages for keyword stuffing.

Source: searchengineland.com

It's almost like Google is a massive corporation with different departments and contractors who don't always coordinate together.

"So the next time you complain about your phone service, why don't you try using two Dixie cups with a string? We don't care, we don't have to. We're the phone company."

Mobile is particularly bad these days. For competitive queries you will often have the entire first screen be ads and need to scroll down to see any organic listings.

That is for all intents and purposes equivalent to an interstitial.

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