Google has announced or leaked a few moves this week. And they’re uniformly shifting traffic away from organic results, and towards pay-per-click ads, cost-per-action ads, or Google properties. The major moves:
- The WSJ reports that Google is moving closer to semantic search rather than merely delivering a list of relevant sites. As Business Insider notes, that’s been Bing’s line for a long time. But Danny Sullivan digs in and notes that Google has been moving in this direction for a long time, and that some of the Journal‘s details are off. (Here’s an extreme example of what this might look like.
- Google now wants AdSense publishers to try out Google+. No word on whether or not this will affect their ad performance, yet.
- Google offers more flight search, activated by more search queries. These flight terms tend to have $1 to $3 costs per click, and there’s a massive long-tail of specific airport and city pairs. If Google is effectively giving itself more free ads on these search results, that should have a measurable effect on Kayak and other SEO-driven airfare search sites.
- Google eliminated a few major blog-spam networks: one lost a quarter of their domains in a week, and a few more are getting removed from the index.
- Google is also working on an “over-optimization” penalty. There are two good interpretations: either this means Google has found new signals for sites that are breaking the rules, or they’re going to go after sites that are merely following the rules too religiously. Like Google’s initial Panda update, this could be more of a PR push than an actual change in policy.
- A former Googler bares all about the company’s excessive focus on social media over user experience.
Google or the Journal might be overstating how ubiquitous answers-in-search-results will be, the net result of this will be less screen real estate (and less desirable real estate) for traditional answers. So far, Google rarely positions answers-in-search results above their main ads, so on many monitors the only clickable result will be one that generates revenue for Google.
The other updates consistently shave off a few more pixels of organic results, and plump up Google’s owned and paid offerings. When Google cuts down on spam networks, that directly impacts their ads, too: spam is more scalable than white-hat SEO, so money pulled out of spam may go to AdWords rather than to more SEO.
In any given week, Google makes plenty of announcements that slightly shift the balance of power between AdWords advertisers and the rest of the web—this week happened to be a very good week for ads, and conversely a bad week for everyone else.
