londrum - 2:53 pm on Nov 16, 2011 (gmt 0)

i think there must be some other reasons for google bad-mouthing ads. surely they aren't silly enough to think that you can judge the quality of a site based on the number of ads.

you can't judge a TV program by the number of ad breaks. you can't judge a newspaper by counting up the ads. you don't say a shopping street is rubbish because there's too many billboards.
i watched formula 1 the other day and the cars are plastered in ads. the drivers have got ads all over the clothes. was it rubbish? nope. people still watch it.

newcastle united football club are in the news at the moment because they want to let advertisers rename their stadium. sure, people would prefer they didnt. but will they stop supporting them? nope. will newcastle be a worse team because of it? of course not. they will probably be a bit better because of the extra revenue. and the same with all the TV stations and papers that carry ads.

i'd offer a wager that sites which carry no ads are the ones more likely to be rubbish, because they are less likely to shell out on the technical, backend, design and content writing stuff.

if google are suggesting that websites go down in quality everytime they add an extra ad above the fold then they are being totally dopey. it's so dopey that i don't think it's part of the algo at all.
when they talk about ads being part of the algo then what they are really referring to are related things -- things like bounce rates etc. adding six million ads to the page will not trigger a penalty in itself, but adding 60 seconds to the page load time will, and so will having 99.9% of people hit the back button when they see them.

so why are they suggesting that it's the ads?
like all google announcements, you have to look at what's in it for them.
when they said we should speed up our sites i reckon they benefited with quicker crawling and storage. and the same when they suggested we noindex all the poor quality pages. presumably they tightened up their index in a flash with that, and no extra work for them!

google aren't in the business of helping everyone improve their sites. they want to be able to sort out the good from the bad. how does this announcement help them do that? it doesn't.

so there must be something else going on -- i reckon they are fed up with ads appearing on bazillions of rubbish pages, because that is only going to annoy their advertisers. which affects their bottom line. so this move is aimed at making a lot of those ads disappear.