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How Google might filter annoying pages
Google recently filed a patent application with the title "Detecting
and rejecting annoying documents". Here's the abstract
of the application:
"A system and method for evaluating documents for
approval or rejection and/or rating.
The method comprises comparing the document to one
or more criteria determining whether the document contains
an element that is substantially identical to one or
more of a visual element, an audio element or a textual
element that is determined to be displeasing."
The document describes how Google might analyze text and
audio files. For example, Google might use optical character
recognition tools and pattern matching against image and
sound databases.
Why did Google do this?
Google probably wants to make their ad reviewing process
faster. Their AdWords system accepts images ads, video
ads and text ads.
Google has ad design guidelines and
Google has to review all of these ads before they can be
displayed in the AdWords network.
Manually reviewing these ads would take a lot of time.
Given the high number of ads that Google displays, it might
be impossible to review them all.
What are they looking for? Does this affect normal
website rankings?
Google wants to avoid that ads are annoying or offensive.
For example, they check if an ad is flashing, has repetitive
movement or infinite loops. The use of streaming video
and audio is also checked as well as the quality of the
images.
Google also checks the content of the ads (offensive language,
adult content) and many associated factors.
While it seems that these methods are currently used for
ads the same criteria can also apply to normal web pages.
If an ad annoys its viewers then it's likely that a web
page with the same elements will annoy its visitors. For
that reason, Google might also use these quality checks
for the normal search results.
What does this mean to your website?
If your website contains many flashy elements, you might
want to redesign it. Professional website design might be
an important factor for high search engine rankings in the
near future.
While professional design is important, it is also important
that search engines can parse the content of your web pages.
Use IBP's search
engine spider simulator to check if search engines can
read your web pages.
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