Ads Galore, Google+ SEO, SOPA, Social Web, Speedlink 03:2012 – iBlogzone.com

Hi everyone! Hope you all had an awesome week. SOPA issue undoubtedly has dominated the buzz this week, and you may have noticed that there were sites, such as WikiPedia, Craiglist, etc., that went dark for a whole 24 hours. All in protest for the proposed Software Online Privacy Act and the PIPA (protect IP Act) bill. Don’t know if you have an idea of what this is all about, but in case you want to know a bit more, Google has done a pretty good job providing more info about SOPA and PIPA. You can also visit SopaStrike.com to learn about the largest online protest in history.

On a side note, Google has yet again made an adjustment on their algorithms. If you display ads on your website, you may want to read this official bog post, where “page layouts” are now in the “eyes” of Google. This may be of interest to you as “way too many” ads, above the fold may affect your sites rankings. Here’s an excerpt:

In our ongoing effort to help you find more high-quality websites in search results, today we’re launching an algorithmic change that looks at the layout of a webpage and the amount of content you see on the page once you click on a result.

The problem here is that it can really be interpreted in many ways. Questions like, how much is too much? How many ads will Google consider excessive before it punishing your site? In a nutshell, I think that what they are saying is that if your “primary” content are difficult to access because of the hurdles you create (ads), then, there’s a good chance that your site may get affected. Just be on the safe side 🙂

As usual, in no particular order:

How can good sites that don’t know about SEO rank well?

Google would appear to favour sites that are built by those who know all the SEO best practice techniques (and follow your tips!). There must be many technically poor sites that actually have fantastic content – surely these shouldn’t be penalized?

That’s it! Enjoy and have a great week ahead.

7 thoughts on “Ads Galore, Google+ SEO, SOPA, Social Web, Speedlink 03:2012”

Brad Callen Fan

January 23, 2012 at 8:24 am

The new Google Plus is interesting.

I’m playing around with hiring people to jack my google plus votes on some of my sites. I’m curious to see the results.

Other than that, too many ads above the fold have already impacted my more adsense heavy sites. These changes are real, best pay attention.

Thanks DiTesco, great list.
Rizwan Sultan

January 23, 2012 at 9:46 am

Hey DiTesco,
A good win, but we must learn from this, the importance, of unity towards a common cause and keep our eyes open for future attempts. Piracy needs to stop but not at the cost of our freedoms!
Ray
January 24, 2012 at 2:25 am

There is a cross post by Google about the ads above the fold that has a lot of interesting comments. They bring up a lot of concerns. However, Google rarely replies to any of them. It is here if interested:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html

I keep hearing a lot of sites got penalized or hit by this one. Although they seemed to have rolled it out over the later half of the week (weekend ish) when traffic tends to be lower anyway. We’ll have to see that people say this week about it.
Carlos Edward

January 24, 2012 at 6:08 am

I think that we must learn from this, the importance, of unity towards a common cause and keep our eyes open for future attempts. Piracy needs to stop but not at the cost of our freedoms, thanks for the post.
Asma Khan

January 24, 2012 at 5:12 pm

Geez, way for that guy to totally side step all the problems with SOPA. The bill just has so many problems, I won’t even go into all of them, I’ll just stick with my pet peeve: The bypassing of due process, and there by the rule of law. SOPA basically puts certain rights, in particular situations, into the hands of corporations. Yes, I use “certain” and “particular”, as in “limited” but these are our rights here, they should never be handed over to the highest bidder (see large corporations).
Carrie

February 20, 2012 at 8:40 am

It’s a shame that politicians think that the public is foolish enough to believe they would accept that this bill was about piracy. It’s not. The piracy won’t stop. It’s like thinking that if the world gun ban went though that all the guns will go away. Those who are going to do illegal activity will still continue to do it.
Kimberly

February 23, 2012 at 7:06 am

SOPA and ACTA are BAD. Actually it was government who tired broke our freedom and america are protest against SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA.
No one like ACTA. ACTA is the 2x worst than SOPA.