This week we have noticed that Adwords ads on Google are now also showing images and as such are taking up much more space. They do this through a “show products from” box. So if you were to do a search, under the ad text itself would appear a plus symbol and the words “show products from”.
When you click to expand this it opens up the first three product listings from the company, each one with their own image. Amazingly the amount of space taken up by the expanded ad text is quite large indeed.
Below is an example of the ad text when it hasn’t been expanded.
Below is an example of the ad text when it’s in expanded view and as you can see it really does take up a fair amount of space.
These types of ads also show on the right hand side of the page too and these ones are better as they do not interfere with how the natural search results are displayed. Google has seemingly gone all out to make the user experience the best as possible.
It will be interesting to see what effect these changes when fully implemented will have and it will be good to see the effect on the conversion rate.
Adam
PPC Consultant
Posted in Pay Per Click | No Comments »
Links are a big part of SEO and ranking. There are many factors that are taken into account when a website is ranked and links in certainly one of them. We have been through it before how one way links from websites in a similar industry with good PageRank are deemed as good strong links.
Another type of linking which is very common is reciprocal linking. This is when two websites swap links so they link to each other. It doesn’t harm your website if you keep to the simple rules like Ive already mentioned, keep it relative, ensure the other site is not part of a link scheme and simply don’t go over the top.
Bearing in mind its best to keep it relative, this morning i discovered a few websites conducting a reciprocal link campaign i would not recommend to our clients. The sites in question had installed directories onto the back of their websites. These directories required a reciprocal link to be entered and some of their pages even have a bit of page rank.
This type of practice is not strictly against any of Googles guidelines, however, if you are implementing SEO to a site you should only really be doing things for the benefit of the user of the website not purely for google or to harvest links. My questions would be is this directory i found been put there for the user? i don’t think so. The directory links to many different industries so from Googles point of view you will have a lot of reciprocal links from irrelevant industries. In terms of SEO this would not be the way to go.
Finally you when you are linking in a way that isn’t straight up you have to think about the future. If this method starts to work and people know it does then all websites would install them and then what would we have? i would describe it as a large scale link farm which i don’t think Google would approve of.
Gary
Senior SEO Programmer
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation | No Comments »
