April 18, 2007 at 13:12Google fights for clean search
In a recent blog post, Matt Cutts, the head of the Google Webspam working group, raised the issue of paid sponsored links on search engine pages and blogs.
Kats noted that many sites are trying to hide sponsored links that are not related to the content of the web page using CSS, and cited as an example a similar code that hides the link to a pornographic Internet resource.
Often paid links are not hidden, but Kats is convinced that, following the rules of fair business, site administrators must explicitly inform users that the advertisements displayed are not related to the topic of the search query and the content of the page as a whole. In addition, special attributes should be used to inform both automatic aggregators and indexers.
Kats also mentioned the so-called “sponsored” WordPress blogging topics. When a blog is designed using similar topics, the words in the blog posts are linked to the sponsor’s website, which complicates the correct indexing of online diaries by the Google search engine, as the number of links to some pages increases many times over. Kats's colleague, Matt Mulenweg, compared a similar advertising technique to providing users with free company logo t-shirts. The more people wear T-shirts, the more popular the company becomes.
In the end, Kats encouraged readers to report paid advertising links, as information from users would help create more efficient algorithms for filtering such ads. However, it is worth noting that Google itself has not yet announced plans to tighten filtering measures for paid links, reports ArsTechnica.
Kats noted that many sites are trying to hide sponsored links that are not related to the content of the web page using CSS, and cited as an example a similar code that hides the link to a pornographic Internet resource.
Often paid links are not hidden, but Kats is convinced that, following the rules of fair business, site administrators must explicitly inform users that the advertisements displayed are not related to the topic of the search query and the content of the page as a whole. In addition, special attributes should be used to inform both automatic aggregators and indexers.
Kats also mentioned the so-called “sponsored” WordPress blogging topics. When a blog is designed using similar topics, the words in the blog posts are linked to the sponsor’s website, which complicates the correct indexing of online diaries by the Google search engine, as the number of links to some pages increases many times over. Kats's colleague, Matt Mulenweg, compared a similar advertising technique to providing users with free company logo t-shirts. The more people wear T-shirts, the more popular the company becomes.
In the end, Kats encouraged readers to report paid advertising links, as information from users would help create more efficient algorithms for filtering such ads. However, it is worth noting that Google itself has not yet announced plans to tighten filtering measures for paid links, reports ArsTechnica.