Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
A quick example would be a search for say something with a bit of competition... lets say 'keyword widgets placename' on Google... off you go... open a tab and do the search.. a regular search nothing surprising. On the right you'll find all of those advertisers competing for position on this prime search.
now Google obviously present their ads using javascript right?
Since these ads also appear on the 'google content network' obviously google give the content publishers a piece of javascript to populate ads onto their site.
Still nothing special....
okay... now select an advert on this list and copy and paste the words verbatim into Google ... if there is a return on this it would be well... coincidental...
Oddly this is NOT the case.. some websites seem to be in forst, second and all the way to 20th position for this search. in fact most if not all actually carry the full advert!
How is this possible. ... well the sites returned are displaying their google ads in HTML and this is being indexed by the engine. It is VERY content rich and in most cases the publisher put nofollows into the links too! this means that the advertiser doesn't even get Google PR for the ad they are paying for!
To top this I really should correct myself because the Advertiser is NOT actually populating the adverts... Google are...Google have decided to damage their own serps by populating hundreds of millions of advers into the serps.
The question is simple is this ethical? and if it is where does this leave Google? are they now to go the same way as Altavista as their listings simply will no longer match the users search!
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 11:55 pm (utc) on Sep. 23, 2007]
[edit reason] removed specifics [/edit]
Really this sounds similar to any other kind of datafeed that is served via PHP or a similar server-side technology. Re Google's ads in particular, if it becomes a search quality issue then I bet they have ways of discounting those links if they wish to. As for the thousands of other RSS feeds that exist, dealing with those intelligently is a more profound problem, but hardly one of Google's making.
This is html with nofollows in the ad links. So that if one searches for the brand name of the site the publishers are returned in the serps sometimes in preference to the actaul owner of the brand!
That does not happen by accident. The code has to be delibrately written with pagerank and SEO in mind.
