As I briefly covered, Google announced tons of new ad features yesterday – two of the more controversial ones within the SEO community are the discover ads that show up on the Google mobile home page and the gallery ads that make some of the search ads on the search results page massive.
Let me show you the new features that upset some.
(1) Discover ads on Google mobile’s home page. It is not enough that the Google mobile home page is no longer just a search box, they added a discover feed – like a news portal would have. Now Google is going to be slipping in ads into that feed, like you’d see on Instagram.
(2) Google can show up to 8 large images in the top search ads, which would push down the organic listings even more. Here is what it might look like:
Here are some of the complaints from the SEO community around this:
And organic gets shoved further down on mobile. https://t.co/0EuixW2G3P
— Joe Youngblood (@YoungbloodJoe) May 14, 2019
SEOs: pic.twitter.com/7Hvzj9538u
— Greg Finn (@gregfinn) May 14, 2019
Anyone remember how Google became the homepage for so many browsers?
As I recall, a big reason was it wasn’t “filled with ads like Yahoo” 😂https://t.co/HmOqI2sVrP pic.twitter.com/rQ4zMtfC8i— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) May 14, 2019
Unbelievable, yet believable.
— Itamar Blauer (@ItamarBlauer) May 14, 2019
Ads above the fold? I thought Google was against poor quality page layouts.
— Dan Bochichio (@thedan1984) May 15, 2019
Evolution from scrappy search engine to ad-supported search engine, and now to an ad search engine backfilled with our answers and natural results from scraping us en masse.
— s/ᛑᛂᛐᛛᛂᚡ// 🦆🌲⛷🏔🛰 (@deckarts) May 14, 2019
Can’t put 5 ads on the top, they’ve squeezed that dry.
They can’t make it any harder to distinguish ads from organic. So the serp is probably close to peak optimization.
Now it’s like where else can we go that has a ton of inventory w few ads. Mobile/chrome/youtube/maps/gmail— Wil Reynolds (@wilreynolds) May 15, 2019
The complaints go on and on and on.
I have no emotions – so don’t ask me my opinion – I just report the chatter. 🙂
Forum discussion at Twitter.