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Pages With Too Many Ads Above The Fold Now Penalized By Google

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Re: Pages With Too Many Ads Above The Fold Now Penalized By Google

#22

Post by PaulHoule »

AdamTReineke wrote: post #13
robk wrote: post #6

This seems rather contradictory with the general AdSense historic guidance to run up to 3 ad units and place them generally to the top and left side of the page (per various pieces of heatmap research often cited). Seems like this could be pretty easily gamed too depending on how much of a CSS-wizard you are, as I suppose the algorithms are somewhat limited in analyzing CSS vs plain HTML layout or Javascript.

There was an article a while back about how Googlebot is likely a version of Chrome that fully renders a page to process it. [1] You're right, without a full browser engine, you could pull a whole host of tricks to make the page appear clean but then put in ads later. Since Googlebot is probably a full featured browser, it becomes a lot harder to trick. [1] http://ipullrank.com/googlebot-is-chrome/

I've seen a lot of evidence that Googlebot evaluates Javascript in a page. For one thing, I've got a site that has Facebook Connect on it, and I see Facebook's bot following on the heels of Googlebot. They work together just like those crabs that work in teams to cut up starfish...

Re: Pages With Too Many Ads Above The Fold Now Penalized By Google

#24

Post by wildmXranat »

blutonium wrote: post #17
epochwolf wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see any ads actually. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/361483/archive/google_search.png

This is how it looks without AdBlock. http://imgur.com/3pOyK

To be fair, I only see the three ads above and none on the right. Still, is this what Google refers to as 'above fold' location ?

Re: Pages With Too Many Ads Above The Fold Now Penalized By Google

#26

Post by RuggeroAltair »

TylerE wrote: post #5

Rather ironic to see this on a site so crowed with obnoxious social media-cruft that it actually took me about 5 seconds to find the article text...

Well, I guess they got penalized and got upset. But it's honestly good if such pages are penalized. Nowadays time is very important, and wasting time on a normal basis just to look through the advertisements is a very annoying thing.

Re: Pages With Too Many Ads Above The Fold Now Penalized By Google

#27

Post by RuggeroAltair »

PaulHoule wrote: post #21

i'm pretty amazed that they didn't do this a long time ago... sites with no content above the fold have been a problem for a long time...

I think they have been trying for a long time, but while it's possible to conceive the idea in a second, it might be harder to find the right algorithms to do it in an effective way. After all they make changes every day and study the response of users randomly distributing new versions of the algorithm to a small group of users that are effectively beta testers without even knowing it. It is a known problem, that's true, it can be tricky. For example it is massively clear for webpages that have keywords such as "iphone" "jailbreak" and so on that pretty much have just ads or want to sell you something without really any content in the page. But if you try to find, say something about a scientific paper in blogs, you don't want to penalize the page of a good blogger that has a few ads towards maybe a crazy crackpot that has their own idea about the universe and knows nothing about real science just because their pages have no ads.

Re: Pages With Too Many Ads Above The Fold Now Penalized By Google

#29

Post by eitland »

TylerE wrote: post #8
robk wrote: post #6

This seems rather contradictory with the general AdSense historic guidance to run up to 3 ad units and place them generally to the top and left side of the page (per various pieces of heatmap research often cited). Seems like this could be pretty easily gamed too depending on how much of a CSS-wizard you are, as I suppose the algorithms are somewhat limited in analyzing CSS vs plain HTML layout or Javascript.

I wouldn't assume that at all. What's keep them from running a GUI-less version of webkit on their server farm. In fact, I'd be surprised if they _didn't_.

Agree. 4 years ago I was offered a position at a Norwegian company that used a modified version of Firefox to read various news sources and compare them, so this was definitely possible back then.

Re: Pages With Too Many Ads Above The Fold Now Penalized By Google

#30

Post by HNatWORK »

AdamTReineke wrote: post #13
robk wrote: post #6

This seems rather contradictory with the general AdSense historic guidance to run up to 3 ad units and place them generally to the top and left side of the page (per various pieces of heatmap research often cited). Seems like this could be pretty easily gamed too depending on how much of a CSS-wizard you are, as I suppose the algorithms are somewhat limited in analyzing CSS vs plain HTML layout or Javascript.

There was an article a while back about how Googlebot is likely a version of Chrome that fully renders a page to process it. [1] You're right, without a full browser engine, you could pull a whole host of tricks to make the page appear clean but then put in ads later. Since Googlebot is probably a full featured browser, it becomes a lot harder to trick. [1] http://ipullrank.com/googlebot-is-chrome/

There are definitely at least two different, shall we say classes of crawlers: The Googlebot and the Google Web Preview crawler. I don't know the extent of Googlebot's javascript parsing but the web preview crawler appears to parse javascript like plain webkit.

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.

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