You've Got to Love Google

Posted On: 2013-06-14

It's Friday and I am so glad it is ... not that it means much to us or most adult webmasters ... we'll still be working over the weekend. But somehow announcing that it's Friday is like drawing a line under a bunch of days that might have ranged from absolutely fantastic to basically very ordinary and making a fresh start.

Our week has been somewhere towards the lower end of the scale ... if something could possibly go wrong then it did this week ... but next week is definitely looking better and if you've been having a less than stellar week then I hope next week is good for you too.

But I didn't want to spend today grumbling about the week we've had ... instead I want to spend some time looking at Google.

Now I don't know about you but when Google's biggest mouthpiece opens his mouth and blesses us with advice and instructions on what we must do to keep Google happy I tend to not always believe what he says.

So when he announced this week we should be guided by Google's results pages if we're in any doubt as to just how much advertising we are 'allowed' to have on a web page I had one of those 'Yeah right!' moments. According to him if we keep our advertising to the what you see on those results pages we won't trigger that part of the algorithm that marks down a site because it has too much advertising.

Of course he knows what he's talking about and we should all take notice and immediately reduce the amount of advertising on our web pages ... but then Google is well known for having a policy of saying one thing and doing another ... so it wasn't long before someone called him on his latest pronouncement with this little gem:

pic.twitter.com/O5HKl3KGKc

It's a screen grab of a Google search results page for the term 'weight bench'. If you can't see that image then let me tell you that it shows that Google is saying one thing and definitely doing something entirely different because it's covered in very prominent ads.

A much larger block than you normally see at the top of the page is taken up with Adwords advertising. Then to the right of that is an even bigger block of advertising from Google's shopping results and then below that there is the normal sidebar that contains more Google Adwords advertising.

And you still wonder why I don't put a lot of credence in anything that Google's mouthpiece says until I've tested it for myself?

Google also made another announcement this week ... but this time it came via their Webmaster Central blog. This is another one of those moves that Google makes from time to time to restrict a website owner's ability to make money on the Web by imposing restrictions on what we can and can't do with our websites.

The latest move is aimed at people who run mobile websites and who dare to be a little pro-active with their marketing efforts. So if you dare have a pop-up that appears as soon as people arrive on your mobile website then Google is going to penalise your site in its mobile search results.

So if you dare to promote your app or newsletter ... or anything else ... via a pop up on your mobile website then Google is going to slap you down. Now of course Google isn't doing that for anything but the purest of reasons ... those sort of interstitial ads annoy the surfers and Google doesn't want its customers to be annoyed by you.

Of course getting people to sign up for an app just might take people out of the search loop and keep them out and Google wouldn't want that now would they? While they may not be able to completely stop people from signing up for apps that interest them they can try and make it much harder by forcing us to put those links where people are more likely to ignore them.

Obviously we now live in a time where Google has almost total control of the flow of information around the Net and it doesn't want to lose that control to all those annoying little apps that just keep on popping up all over the place.

I wonder just how long it will be before we see Google make its next move that's aimed at tightening that control. Everything about the Net and the way people interact with it is changing and Google won't want to let their control slip away.