Web Marketing Strategy Update

Google makes money by selling targeted advertising space. That’s its core business. Providing search results is simply the vehicle for doing so. Search doesn’t generate revenue in itself.

Has it ever occurred to you how contradictory the goals of these two activities are?

One being to provide perfectly targeted search results, the other to sell as much advertising as possible?

What would happen if every time someone performed a search, they found EXACTLY what they were looking for in the first few results?

This is what would happen: people would hardly ever click on the Adsense ads displayed on the results pages.

Why do people click on ANY link?

Because they think that it will take them to a page about whatever it is they are looking for.

Why do people click on the Adsense ads around the search results?

Because they think the ad is more likely to take them to a page about whatever it is they are looking for than the other links they see on the page.

Key Point:

If every time you did a search on Google the first 5 results appeared to be closer matches for whatever it is you are looking for than the ads, you would click on those links, not the ads.

(Studies that show most users prefer the organic listings).

It’s the same with ads for content. If all the sites in Google with top placements for a particular keyword phrase provided comprehensive and high quality content about that keyword, hardly anyone would click on the Adsense ads for content displayed on the website.

Google are performing a balancing act.

It doesn’t make sense that Google should want to provide *perfect* search results. That would result in a massive drop in earnings. On the other hand, they need to be seen to be striving towards the goal of perfect search results, because that’s what consumers want, and Google’s stated objective.

Think for a moment. In the last few years, as technology drives us further and further into the world of sci-fi, what great changes have we seen in web page search?

Have we seen the introduction of ground-breaking new technology? The introduction of artificial intelligence perhaps?

No.

All that’s happened is more filters and “tweaks” have been added to what we already have, making the algorithms more complex and better able to catch the more obvious spam pages, but barring that, no vast improvements in the accuracy of the search results you get.

(Who knows, maybe even part of the reason Google switches their result sets around so much is to give the illusion of greater accuracy and a company hard at work constantly testing and improving the search results for you? This “here today, gone tomorrow,” situation in the SERPS might enable Google to get away with more junk pages, because ironically it probably has a tendency to make consumers more forgiving, by leading them to think “Google are obviously working hard to improve the results, so there’s bound to be errors sometimes.”)

Innovations like search preferences add to the illusion that search quality is getting better while we are distracted by exciting new areas like video search, instead of seeing real technology improvements in the core business of plain text search.

And surfers concerned enough about the quality of results they get to bother using search preferences are probably the most likely to make noise and/ or go elsewhere when the results are poor. Giving them their own SERPS pulls them out of the pool of potential complainers.

Google wants to filter out the more obvious spam a) because users get annoyed when it comes up in their search results, and may defect to the competition, and b) because it is damaging to their image, showing that even in 2007, with all their hi-tech wizardry and money, the truth is Google still can’t tell the difference between a quality page of useful information and one of overt, right-in-your-face gibberish.

But Google doesn’t want to get rid of ALL the cheap low-value pages because they bring in a LOT of revenue.

On the other hand, they can’t have too many, because not only do users complain about the search quality, Google also starts to lose revenue from Adsense advertisers as the CCL (Critical Crap Level) is reached and they decide that results from the Content Network have passed the point where they are still willing to advertise.

Like I said, it’s a juggling act.

If Google really wanted too, they could remove 90% of the MFA (made for Adsense) sites overnight.

One simple way would be to flag every Joe Publisher ID appearing on more than 10 or 20 domains and drop the sites from the Google index pending a 2 minute manual review to check the quality of the site content (10 seconds is enough too spot most MFA sites).

Few regular account holders not playing the MFA game would have so many domains showing Adsense.

Instead Google uses the Adsense TOS to scare publishers into building better quality sites, whilst simultaneously providing catch-all clauses to justify closing any account that’s causing a problem.