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Google Will Soon Start Punishing Mobile Sites that Use Annoying App Install Ads

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Re: Google Will Soon Start Punishing Mobile Sites that Use Annoying App Install Ads

#91

They're looking at you http://www.ultimate-guitar.com

That website looks so dated nowadays. Really needs a revamp.

Probably because they've been putting all of their resources into the app which they advertise so annoyingly.

Re: Google Will Soon Start Punishing Mobile Sites that Use Annoying App Install Ads

#94
post #67
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Site owners should be punished for those banners, as they could refrain from using third party tracking cookies instead.

[deleted]

google analytics uses first party cookies.

Re: Google Will Soon Start Punishing Mobile Sites that Use Annoying App Install Ads

#95
post #56

You know, at some point (and we are around that point) Google does cross a line where they are abusing their near monopoly on search. This is a pro consumer move, but it's another instance of Google saying do things our way or we punish you.

Google's job is to get you the information that you want as fast as possible. Said another way, it wants to get you off of its search results page as soon as it can.

This is anecdotal, but I almost always abandon pages that lead to an app interstitial, which means that I end up back on the results page. This is a pretty unambiguous signal to Google that the search result was bad. So, the remedy that they're proposing is good and obvious.

Re: Google Will Soon Start Punishing Mobile Sites that Use Annoying App Install Ads

#96
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. A Yelp for websites that encourages sites to be good web citizens.

I would like to see a vote based search engine with modified reddit-style searching where a single vote's relevance is a function of its age and the number of existing votes. (but without the post life cycle of reddit where posts drop because of age)

Like many interesting ideas in search, this one's been tried several times. Blekko and Bing both used Facebook friends' likes for votes, but coverage was low. Google toyed with up/down votes for a short while after Wikia Search launched, but I suspect the overwhelming majority of votes were malicious.

On the other hand, using result long-clicks as votes is quite popular, and seems to work well.

Re: Google Will Soon Start Punishing Mobile Sites that Use Annoying App Install Ads

#97

Ha. Yet their advertising optimisation teams continue to tout the benefits of implementing an interstitial ad unit on mobile: https://developers.google.com/mobile-ads-sdk/docs/dfp/androi... Edit. More here: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/products/mobile-ads-intersti... Left hand doesn't know what right hand is doing.

Those links appear to be about ads within apps, not on web pages.

They can often be annoying, but that's different than interstitials on top of a mobile web site, right?

Re: Google Will Soon Start Punishing Mobile Sites that Use Annoying App Install Ads

#98

Does that mean they'll block youtube? Try playing a video on a phone that does not have the youtube app installed, it's just about impossible to get it right, it's a roulette that's rigged with more than half the links going to the youtube app page on google play. Highly annoying since there is no reason why the youtube page of some video should even have that app installation link at all.

is this true on iPhone as well?

No. I never use the YouTube app on my iphone. I always play a video by doing:

Chrome app -> youtube.com (no prompt to install/switch to YouTube app, simply redirects me to m.youtube.com) -> search video -> play (which plays out of chrome and does not switch). The whole process is exactly how I'd hope/expect it to be.

I've exclusively used Youtube through the chrome app instead of the Youtube app because a few years ago I found that the search results were significantly worse/more heavily filtered through the Youtube app for some reason and never used it again.

Re: Google Will Soon Start Punishing Mobile Sites that Use Annoying App Install Ads

#100
post #18

Does this apply to "please subscribe to our stupid newsletter" that obscures many sites now?

I'm more annoyed with these sites than the app install sites. "Install our app" is annoying but still trying their best to send us where we will have better have better experience (at least that's what they think). These "subscribe to our newsletter" sites do it for their own good and couldn't care less about visitors. They do it so they can spam them with their emails

Those are particularly annoying when im halfway through reading and they popup out of nowhere. I'm surprised it's an effective tactic at all to annoy readers (it has to be effective if they're doing it).
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