Can't speak for everyone, but in my case I've got a lot of old legacy rubbish that I need to access through IE that just won't work through Chrome or any other browser.
We have to keep it around for the admin control panels and management interfaces in some of our older (and not even that old) network hardware. Basically anything pre 2010 that uses frames and other crap like that.
There's two kinds of on-video ads on YouTube. The ones that you described, which play before or during the video that you're watching, pausing the video, and then the ads that display in a little overlay at the bottom of the video.
I don't see how either of these would be alright by this new pseudo-policy, but your argument most definitely does not apply to the latter kind.
Not sure I understand. Both are an overlay blocking content. I suspect Google would still punish an interstitial overlay with a countdown timer that dismissed it. If you don't click, YouTube sometimes makes you watch 30+ seconds of ads.
To be honest I've seen a couple advertisements that I watched the full ~5 minutes. Both were game trailers that were really interesting. I would have rather had a "click here to view the actual trailer video instead of the ad version" button though. I was sold after the first 2 minutes, but couldn't see the full name of the game until the end.
Over 95% of the stuff I watch on Youtube is gameplays, collagehumor and tech reviews, yet all my ads are diapers or clothing softeners. I've no idea why their algorithm sucks so much for my account.
I'll take a pop up ad over and inline any day at least I know it's not a part of the content and the close button is usually in the same place-ish.
In line ads always confuse the hell out of me especially now that they are getting so camouflaged into the content and content sites have the scroll to next piece of content functionality.
How will Google punish themselves? Or will Google just punish the publishers who bothered to follow their repeated recommendations to run page level ads on their site?
Have you ever seen the little "x" in the corner of google display ads? If you click it, you're asked for the reason you're objecting to the ad. Among them "ad covers content".
Meaning: you shouldn't always assume the worst, especially if there's evidence against it.
I think the difference is the potential for abuse. It's not possible for a YouTube advertiser to make a YouTube ad appear to be a system popup or for it to attempt to take over my browser experience by full screening. Keep in mind, Google has been fine with popup ads until 2017.
The difference is how advertising has been done traditionally. Think about TV vs. print. Advertisements need to be interspersed in both mediums, but how it is accomplished is different based on the medium. Why would it be different just because we now consume both on a different platform?
Maybe Google Search is punishing search scores for YouTube videos because of ads, but since most online videos exist only on YouTube, those results generally still rank highly regardless of the penalty?
given that it's not automatic and it doesn't work on mobile or for people who have no experience in html, it doesn't work and it should not be even considered as a solution, because internet is not for tech-savy people and this discussion is about marketing and internet advertisement which is for all people.
so no, it doesn't work on a larger scale. it's like suggesting to hack MS Windows checks if provided licence key is valid in order to use OS. It works, but for narrow audience, and we should discuss about how to solve issue for all users.
I suppose it's a matter of practicality - with most text heavy sites you can put ads around the text and it works just fine. But with something like Youtube, that approach isn't really going to be as effective because people generally won't be scrolling around the page.
This is only really because you're already aware of where YouTube's buttons are and how they work. If you visited any given other website often enough, it'd be more or less the same.
I've seen a number of sites prompting via a modal that isn't the browser's built-in functionality. If you say no, it just prompts again in a day or two. If you say yes, then you get the built-in (blockable) "enable notifications?" prompt.
I work for an e-commerce company. This absolutely brutalized our sales until we made significant changes to our layout.
I understand that this instance is seen as a net positive for the end user, but Google should not have the power to force websites to conform to whatever Google decides is the new standard, or become irrelevant.
The end user should be deciding what is and isn't worthwhile content, or where to shop, or what have you. Not Google.
What kind of ecommerce company? I do a lot of work in the sector.
Your business is dependent on Google for traffic. You can embrace it and be beholden to platform rules, or you can build a direct audience and brand. The latter is hard but more defensible and there are many case studies to follow of other companies doing this.
If people come in through Google because they are searching for something and instead of arriving at the content that was advertised in search results, see a content covering popup, that's not really informed decision making. I think Google has legitimate right to rank sites that do this lower.
If users heard there were better results elsewhere though, they would switch from Google. However, it is more likely that by doing this Google prevents itself from being taken over by a competitor that creates this feature.
I actually just added a full-screen video popup to a site a few days ago, and I made it so that it won't appear to googlebot. This wasn't for deceptive purposes, just because it wasn't relevant. I only show the video once to users, and it doesn't appear when they go back to the site...it's just a walkthrough of our products, which many people seem to need. I suspect many sites will check for googlebot and not show their popups to avoid this penalty.
In my own case, I'm showing the same thing as users who have been there > 1 times. I could remove the check and it wouldn't make much difference, as gbot uses cookies anyway.
For sites that always show the popup to users and never show it to gbot, I agree. However I've seen a lot of scammy sites that do this kind of time so I don't know how likely google is to find out about it.
You're not getting "caught", and Google can fuck right off with any "terms of service" that I never agreed to about how I respond when they scrape my site without permission.
I know that there are practical concerns here, but Google has done a masterful job of shaping the conversation so that many people think anything not sanctioned by Almighty Google with regard to SEO (let alone actual "blackhat" tactics) is illegal or immoral.
It's not illegal, but if you're hiding content from Googlebot because you don't want it to derank that page, once they crawl it with an agent that hides the fact that it's Google, they will then derank your whole website.
So it's not illegal, but if you think you're beating Google by doing it, they're well aware of this workaround and will punish you harder.
If you don't care about ranking, then no biggie. But why would you manipulate your web server like that if you weren't trying to rank.
No one needs permission to request a web page, and that includes bots. But if that still bothers you, why not create arobots.txt with your preferences?
You’re giving permission to scrape by way of having a page accessible to the general public. If googlebot is bothering you so much, install a two line robots.txt and it’ll go away.
I'm not so sure about that. They change up things a lot. Search is only part of the equation however, people can still buy an add to show you anything they like. So these practices aren't going away, they're just pushed into an arbitrage situation.
Any idea what would happen to chat boxes that pop up on companies websites? they don't block the content and are there to interact with customers (think olark).
Does anyone know if that would lead to lower search ranking as well?
This is great. Ideally you look at the % of the page with actual content and % of the page with 'everything else' and sort by % content. Hopefully, this would motivate sites to compete with one another for cleaner UX.
i dont know why they always says this and never fulfill. search 'free porn' and youll see pornhub.com and xnxx.com and they have popups but never get deranked.
Could they just get around the requirement by using the HTML5 storage stuff? It's such a silly legal requirement. There's significant privacy concerns. And they make me close this silly message that has nothing to do with privacy at all.
That's not google reminding you of privacy settings (in fact if you want to change those this menu is highly impractical with a lot of nesting). This is google making you agree with their T&C to go any further.
Isn't that effectively a legal requirement? That users must make some sort of actual confirmation step to acknowledge the terms for them to be legally enforceable?
I mean, look at my submission/comment history, I'm literally the voice of Google criticism on this website. But it's hard to see how this little diversion has to do with pop-up ads. It's not advertising, first and foremost.
(Google is my default search engine. I just have their tracking blocked, so they can't check this. Lame.)