Danny Sullivan quotes Cutts as saying, “If you have ads obscuring your content, you might want to think about it…Do they see content or something else that’s distracting or annoying?”

Cutts said they’re testing algorithms that determine, ”what are the things that really matter, how much content is above the fold.”

Ads have been been a known part of the Google quality equation for some time, particularly as people have tried to recover from the Panda update. Remember that list of questions Google put out that highlighted what webmasters should asking themselves when assessing the quality of their pages? One of those was:

Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?

So, it’s not exactly a huge new revelation that Google is looking at this stuff, but to hear that they’re actually testing new algorithms based on this is a new thing.

We’ll certainly be following developments in this area. Suffice it to say that now would probably be a good time to evaluate your ads to content ratio.

I just spotted a story on Sphinn that will likely get deleted because it is all in Russian – the Google Directory has apparently been updated from DMOZ data from 08/01/2008 (European date notation)

That wouldn’t be significant other than Google lists pagerank alongside the listings in their version of DMOZ

I have highlighted a few sites that as far as I am aware still have a manual PageRank penalty for what Google might consider selling PageRank Passing Links, including this one.

If you look carefully you will notice that the values shown in the Google Directory are considerably higher than those shown on the Google Toolbar.

It seems Google used their real dataset for PageRank for the Google Directory export, forgetting that they are telling their millions of users lies on their toolbar with manual penalties, which until now had no visible proof.

Google have the right to do whatever they like with their search engine, but this is another major demonstration of how Google are manipulating public and advertiser opinion. They still state that the toolbar PageRank displayed is:-

Wondering whether a new website is worth your time? Use the Toolbar’s PageRank™ display to tell you how Google assesses the importance of the page you’re viewing.

It seems my listing which was previously as a PR5 has moved up a number of places, so there is a good chance I am now on the bottom of the PR6 sites listed.

Lets be clear, even though I am most likely a PR6 site, I am not selling PageRank when I write reviews, they are editorial links.

Comments

*Originally published at AndyBeard.eu