Google Search, lots of Ads
Background: I fell in love with Google a long time ago, because of what it represented to me – a sort of “democratization of business”.
So, I was just checking out the latest “winners and losers” from Google’s latest algorithm changes, ie here and here…
The headline around the decision was that it would target “content farms”. And there were plenty of the usual suspects – content farms (ehow & ezinearticles) and URLs like voucherstar & aceshowbiz.com. Cool. Sounds reasonable.
But then…there are a few that…surprised me: Shopping.com, Shopzilla, BizRate, and Nextag.
Hrm…why would Google murder the comparison shopping sites? Aren’t they useful? Don’t they help consumers find the best price?
I wonder…what do they all have in common. Hmm. Let’s see….
Ah…I’ve got it. They all do what Google now overwhelmingly does with any product-related search – comparison shopping. Try it. Go search for “digital camera” or “hammock”. What % of the total results does Google now make $ off of?
The Google Search Results Page Becomes An AdSense Farm
Now, fully 90-95% of the links on the Google homepage are all directly monetized by Google.
This is nothing terribly new…it’s just one of those slow evolutions that you almost don’t even notice, like the proverbial frog in water. Remember when Google was a website that helped you find other websites? Then, the ads slowly started creeping in on the right side…but it was still okay…if you built a really useful site, you could still be found on Google. Then came the ads across the top, but hey, there were some organic results still. Then came the product listings on the top right…and it just keeps going. Now, unless you are the #1 result, then fewer than 10% of searchers will ever even see your organic listing.
And it’s not just ecommerce. Google is, and has been doing this for many years, across all of the high monetization verticals: travel, online classifieds, finance, etc.
Well, Google is always looking out for the searcher…right? What does Google say about some of the sites that were dethroned?
Google says: “Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?” That’s reasonable. After all, who wants to come to a website that is just jam packed with ads. But…isn’t that EXACTLY what the Google search results page has become? For monetizable searches, the above-the-fold window is now something like 90-95% ads!
So here’s my question. How would Google’s search results page rank within it’s own algorithm? (1) it would certainly get knocked for duplicate content (2) it’s absolutely dominated by ads (3) it features no original content of its own…and on and on.
Clearly it is within Google’s rights to do this, but it sure does make it tough for the entrepreneur.
By the way, with the Panda algorithm update…who were the SEO winners? News organizations, bloggers, and video producers.
Why? Well, Google will say it’s those sites that produce original, unique content…and that’s definitely got merit.
The skeptic in me would say that those are the types of sites that aren’t going to pay for clicks anyway. Meanwhile, if you lower hammock sellers in the organic listings…what are they to do? They have no real alternative other than to go buy clicks (and pay google for them).
An even greater skeptic would say that it’s pretty clever for Google to show up a bunch of their own PPC ads and then a bunch of news articles. If you search for “hammocks”, are you going to click on the current #2 organic result, “hammockmusic.com”, or are you going to click on those big beautiful hammock photos that Google has?
Of course, Google will say that by placing products on a product search results page…that they are getting the end user closer to what they want…and there’s merit to that argument…but the thing is, when you click on one of those Google product listings, they take you a price comparison page…just like Nextag and the rest would do.
So..what Google is really doing here is replacing the intermediaries with itself…another intermediary. It’s useful to take note of the fact that Google is no longer a “Search Engine” that helps you find websites that are useful…at least not in the monetizable categories. For ecommerce searches, it’s a comparison shopping site. For travel searches, it’s a travel aggregator. For local searches, it’s an online classifieds service, and on and on.
Google Search is now an amalgamation of a bunch of vertical shopping sites that are completely overloaded with Google ads…precisely the type of landing page that Google encourages website publishers to avoid. And as a website publisher, that vexes me.
So…who’s going to be the big winner with the latest Google algorithm change? Well, that’s obvious! Google!
Now I’m going to go post this story on my new favorite website…Google+.
