Sunday Morning - ($ave Hundred$ on Your Car Insurance!)
There's nothing free in this world, everything comes with a cost. If you are not charged directly for a product or service, you usually pay for it in some other way, and that includes spending part of your time looking at (or listening to) an advertisement. Somebody has to pay the freight somehow and when it comes to things like newspapers or tv/radio broadcasts, the primary revenue comes from advertisers who hope their tantalizing message convinces you to do business with them.
This method of financing pertains to websites just as much as any other information-delivery source. That's why you see some ads on Firegeezer and just about every other premiere website. There are costs involved in running a website, including blogs like this one, and unless you have a beneficial trust fund supporting you, then you need some help in keeping the website up and running smoothly and reliably.
But you have no doubt come across some websites that appear to exist not for trading information, but to act as a bulletin board for ads that take up 90% of the space on the webpage. They are irritating and are never anyone's first choice of what to read when they sit down before the monitor and start browsing. Those junk sites get their action by placing key words and phrases that are currently popular in their meager content in the hopes of being brought to your attention when you key in these words on a search engine. When you click on their link in the hopes of finding something worthwhile, you get these pages that are overloaded with ads placed helter-skelter around the page creating a confusing visual that is more irritating than helpful.
Well, Google (who helps create many of those ads) says that help for you is on the way. They announced last week that they have made an adjustment to their search engine algorithms (whatever those are) so that websites theat have "too much" ad content on the front page will not be posted on search results, or at best way down the rankings. eWeek tells us:
Google Search Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts said the algorithm tweak looks at the layout of a Web page and the amount of content a user sees on the page once they've clicked on a search result.
"If you click on a Website and the part of the Website you see first either doesn't have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site's initial screen real estate to ads, that's not a very good user experience," Cutts explained in a corporate blog post. "Such sites may not rank as highly going forward."
Cutts was careful to note that Google recognizes ads placed above the fold perform well for Websites. Accordingly, Google isn't punishing Websites that place ads at the top of Web pages "to a normal degree."
Rather, he and his team are penalizing Websites that put what they deem an "excessive" amount of ads up top, or simply make it hard to find content on the page.
To wit, he estimated the change would impact less than 1 percent of searches to Google.com worldwide.
One percent? Really? Just a moment ago I went to Google's search engine and entered "dvd players" to see what kind of websites would be displayed. Below is a screen cap of what showed up, a page full of ads and only one link to a search result above "the fold."
Way to go, Google!!
Unfortunately for the readers, this move does not affect pop-ups or pop-unders, just static ads on the front page "above the fold." But every little bit helps, I suppose.
Now let's help ourselves and get our equipment checked out for today. I'm going to get some more coffee started before we meet back in the day room. And don't forget: Please support our advertisers.
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