> Measuring the usefulness of a page by percentage of screen real estate only seems useful if the user is looking or clicking randomly around the screen.
The bigotry in this has been pointed out by many people already ... Google is basically forcing other sites to use less attractive advertising while offering extremely annoying ads "above the fold" themselves, smells like unfair competition to me.
Try thinking about this from the user's perspective rather than the site owner's perspective. How do you like it when you click on an ad that looks like it has useful information behind it, and you come to a page that's mostly ads?
> How do you like it when you click on an ad that looks like it has useful information behind it, and you come to a page that's mostly ads?
Was that a Freudian slip? If I click on an ad that doesn't fulfill my expectation, the advertiser failed and will feel it, the market fixes this in the long run.
If I click on a search result (perhaps you meant that) and I get to see mostly ads, I can a) install an ad blocker, b) go back and click on the next result, c) ignore the ads or actually click on the ads. But there's nothing about this that warrants special treatment for Google's pages, which are full of ads. If Google thinks, users will not like pages full of ads, they should stop cluttering their search results with them. If they don't, they're just giving themselves an unfair advantage over the indexed pages.
You should tell Google that. They claim to be penalizing web sites with too many ads "above the fold": http://searchengineland.com/google-may-penalize-ad-heavy-pag...
The bigotry in this has been pointed out by many people already ... Google is basically forcing other sites to use less attractive advertising while offering extremely annoying ads "above the fold" themselves, smells like unfair competition to me.