From research sent to me by JP Morgan (this link may work):
Google recently posted an entry on its website that suggested the company would begin showing fewer ads on queries where they may not be relevant, and more ads on queries for which the ads may be useful. The changes were to take place over several weeks, beginning sometime in April.
· In 1Q, we began conducting a study to monitor changes to Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs). Our survey included 20k+ keywords, and we tracked the coverage, the number ads, and the positioning of ads.
· Our survey identified a 19% increase in the number of queries with three sponsored links above the algorithmic results. Thus far in 2Q, we have identified the 3rd link on an average of 7.6% of queries, compared to 6.4% at the end of 1Q.
· We believe Google prefers to show the 3rd link on commercial queries. The categories with the largest 3rd link exposure QTD were ‘Shopping & Classifieds’ (18.3% of queries), ‘Travel’ (12.9% of queries) and ‘Business & Finance’ (11.8% of queries).
· We believe these changes will lead to higher CTRs and CPCs, all else being equal. We are therefore increasingly confident that the company may report upside to our 2Q estimate. Google continues to be our top pick, and we believe the shares will show material appreciation by the end of the year.
I just hope they do not get carried away and add a 4th sponsored link at the top.
Little things like this and the switch to borderless AdSense ads can certainly add up and may help forestall a flat-revenue quarter.
Way to go JPM. A Wall Street firm must have hired SEOs, engineers and other experts to see the impact of Google’s modified algorithm.
Changing the way links look should usually help to get the ctr up, so they need to do it more frequntly to fight the ad blindness.
It would have been interesting if JPM also analysed over time the movement of individual links on the serps pages. There is a popular theory on seo forums that one of the factors behind the dumping of thousands of commercial sites down the serps in the latest round of ‘bigdaddy’ updates is to force site owners to replace lost traffic by buying AdWords.
Surely wayyy too evil..??
Named Entity Extraction (as opposed to unnamed entities? nouns?) – This sounds like Google Sets. IIRC they were scanning text for list-type noun phrases (eg North, South, East and West), and building up associations from themSohbet