New Google Guidelines Makes Advertising Better for Locals

Writing by Brick Marketing on Monday, 31 of March , 2008 at 8:17 pm

Google recently wrote a blog post on ad placement, aimed specifically at Blogger blogs. There are quite a few people who want to make a quick buck and just do a very simple site and use AdWords as content. Not only is this confusing and misleading for visitors, it also hits Google local advertisers where it hurts, in the wallet.

With the latest regulations, things are looking up. There will hopefully be less of this type of non-blogging going on and therefore fewer useless clickthroughs that Google local advertisers are paying for. There´s nothing worse than ending up with clicks that aren´t going to do anything for you because people are looking for content that just doesn´t exist on the blog.

According to Google, there are several types of bad ad placement that will be banned.

Ads shouldn’t be placed under a title or section heading in a way that implies that the ads are not ads.
For example, ads shouldn’t be placed under titles such as “Dallas Business Opportunities” or “Today’s Hot Deals”. Placing ads directly below titles such as these implies to your users that the links in the ads are publisher-created content.

Ads should be easily distinguishable from surrounding content.
Similarly, you should not place an ad unit by a group of links that has identical colors and line spacing. Doing so may cause users to think the ad unit is content created by you.

This could drastically reduce those extra clicks that you as a Google local advertiser can´t use. While it may mean a loss of income for some spam bloggers, it will certainly be a step forward for Google´s advertisers.

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Category: Google Local

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