Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
For one of the worst examples, do a search for "meta tags". For one site in the top five, Google shows this for a date
"27k - Aug 4, 2007". Yet when you go to that page, you see this: First published Oct. 1997
Updated Nov. 1998
For any information on Metatags, that page is obviously worthless - but so are 6 of the other results that show up on the first page. In fact, Wikipedia seemed to be the only truly up to date one of the ten.
And it is not just a few pages. It is a large percentage of the results that show up on the first few pages. Aside from Wikipedia and 3 other sites, nearly all of the first 30 results are badly outdated for that search term.
But what I noticed in all of those badly outdated pages is that they ALL have ads running - usually Google Ads, but not only those.
It appears that Google is looking at the ads on those pages, NOT the content, to determine when or if it has been updated. And this seems to be happening for a large number of search terms - on one search relevant to our industry the #2 site was a URL from a long out of business company that was nothing but a massive Adsense and banner ad site.
I don't know how much weight Google places on how often or how recent a page is updated, but if automatic ads are making the pages "appear" to be a lot more recent and/or actively updated than they really are, this would seem to destroy any algorithm that Google has in place for this.
Note - normally we don't allow specific search terms in posts.
For the purposes of making this point concrete, we are going to allow this
one-time exception. Please, do not post other search terms in this thread,
either in support of the idea or as a counter-example.
I don't find these results to be a problem in the are of relevance. Perhaps in the area of freshness, yes ... but what is the intent of someone who searches on "meta tags" for real? In most cases, I would think they are looking for very basic, foundation information and these results would serve them pretty well.
Not that Wlauzon has a bad point - how does Google measure freshness or page updates? How big a factor is this in the scoring algo? Recently they've put a lot of focus on speed of indexing for new pages - Matt Cutt's has even blogged about "minty fresh indexing" [mattcutts.com], but do ads subvert their purpose, making old information look frewsheer than it is?
but do ads subvert their purpose, making old information look frewsheer than it is?
The tag example was just one of the more common search term examples - but over the past few days I have tried 50+ other terms, some deliberately very rare.
And it DOES seem like ads - especially banner ads - are affecting the "freshness factor". I managed to find a small number of "no ad" sites, but all seem to rank very poorly, even though the content itself is often much more up to date and relevant.
I don't know of a really good way to test this, since you would almost have to have something like a double-blind test on identical content sites - one with ads, one without. So all I have to go on is observed evidence, but right now it sure seems biased in favor of the ad-running sites.
