Google May Penalize Ad-Heavy Pages

Google’s anti-spammeister Matt Cutts announced Nov. 9 at Pubcon that the search giant is testing new algorithms to measure how much content on a page is “above the fold”, or actually relevant to the search query, vs. how much content is advertising that may be obscuring the actual content.

“If you have ads obscuring your content, you might want to think about it,” suggested Cutts in his presentation. “Do they see content or something else that’s distracting or annoying?” While Google’s Panda update already penalizes web pages with little original content, Cutts’ remarks indicate Google is further trying to separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of relevant content.

A quandary for web revenue models

While more testing will reveal “how much is too much”, Google’s impending actions would appear to make it more difficult for content creators to generate revenue from advertising on high-ranking pages. Of course, Google itself derives 99% of its revenue from advertising, so any tweaks to content-ranking algorithms will likely be exceedingly subtle at first. Third-party advertisers and content aggregators will need to watch these developments carefully, though.