The first thing I noticed is how damn close the adsense adverts are to the rating system. I accidently clicked on one while voting quickly. I wonder how many others have done the same?

Which brings about the question – Where should Google draw the line between adverts that honestly integrate as part of a website and those that go out of there way to optimise specifically for the accidental click…

How much are these ads pulling in? I would love to see the conversion rate on them. How many of those accidental clicks like mine are getting filtered and classed as invalid?

Would you trust your ads sitting there next to a voting system?!

From what I can see the ad placement is not breaking Googles terms and conditions. Some advertisers just need to use site exclusion.

This time instead of just effecting the search network advertisers, Google seem to be trying to reduce traffic to sites that offer a ‘poor user experience’ on their content network to.

Google explain “In the next few days, we will be making two changes to how AdWords evaluates landing page quality. First, we’ll begin incorporating landing page quality into the Quality Score for your contextually-targeted ads, using the same evaluation process as we do for ads showing on Google.com and the search network. Advertisers who may be providing a poor experience on their site will notice that their traffic across the content network decreases as a result of this change. Second, we’re improving our algorithm for evaluating landing page quality and incorporating landing page content retrieved by the AdWords system. “

So it looks as though they are once again after the MFA type sites getting cheap clicks on the content side aswell, in theory traffic should be limited somewhat by Googles algo update to these. Plus it looks as though there’s further updates for the search network too!

Google continue “As with our July system update, both of these changes will affect a very small portion of advertisers, so the vast majority of advertisers will not be affected at all by either change. However, those who may be providing a low quality user experience will see an increase in their minimum bids for Google.com and the search network and/or a decrease in traffic across the content network. In most cases, we expect that the higher minimum bids will cause the low quality ads and keywords to become “inactive for search.”

What do you think of this change? Is it a little arrogant of Google to think they can police the web and identify what ingredients make up a good user experience for everyone?

Are we getting a little tired of the lack of transparency shown by Google?

Check out some of the conversation over at Threadwatch.