Major News About Google Banner Advertisements
Google Opts To Feature Banner Advertisements
Those of you who’ve been involved in search engine marketing for some time may remember Marissa Mayer’s promise that ‘There will not be crazy flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site.’ Well times have changed since the ex Google CEO switched allegiance to Yahoo. We’ve seen the inclusion of Google doodles. And now the leading search engine is allowing a select group of American companies to purchase banner advertisements for branded queries.
Representatives of Google have stressed that they are merely trialling the inclusion of banner advertisements. However, the HookedOnMedia team have been discussing the implications of a wider roll out. We believe that there are positive and negative points regarding the inclusion of the banner advertisements. Companies could definitely enjoy the benefits of increased search engine exposure. Consumers will also be able to view more information about the brands that they’re searching for. However, there is a risk that big businesses could monopolise the main search pages.
American Professor Responds To The Bing It On Challenge
If you’ve been reading the Hooked On blog for a while then you’ll probably remember stories about the Bing It On Challenge. This involved a blind test of search results from Google and Bing. It was discovered that people preferred the Bing results by a margin of 2:1. However, the study has been called into a question by a respected American Professor. He’s pointed out that Bing had surveyed a relatively small number of people. It was also suggested that Bing had strategically chosen the search terms to ensure some bias.
Bing responded to the criticisms by revealing that they’d chosen search terms from Google’s 2012 Zeitgeist report. A spokesperson for the Microsoft search company suggested that ‘[Bing] provide better results for current news topics than Google does.’ He also pointed out that Bing hadn’t released statistics from the online survey because they have a responsibility to respect people’s privacy.
Larger Websites Don’t Necessarily Rank Highly
Matt Cutts recently took the time to respond to the question of whether large sites with masses of indexed pages are deemed as having the greatest authority by Google. Unsurprisingly he pointed out that it isn’t enough just to build great numbers of web pages. Webmasters who really want to make headway in the search engine listings are required to produce quality content and build valuable links. He also revealed that sites with considerable amounts content would stand a better chance of ranking for long tail search phrases.
Hooked On Media’s Andrew Thomas said, ‘If a large website is of poor quality, thin content, uses duplicate content or is a website that isn’t themed to one subject then the smaller website would have a chance of out ranking. But I think since the Penguin updates back in early 2012, this has already had a impact, and put a stop to large spammy sites. A quality website should always outrank a poor website, this is something Google is continually working on, with some degree of success.’
