This week has been rich in interesting discussions!
Forum members have been talking about Google’s planned Chrome Adblocker, 2017 State of the Internet Trends report, Google’s drop of NOODP meta tag support and what it means for marketers and marketing conferences.
Here are our highlights:
Report: Google Plans Ad Blocking in Chrome
In a perplexing move, Google announced that they plan to release their own adblocker.
To quote the referenced Wall Street Journal (WSJ) Article,
“The ad-blocking feature, which could be switched on by default within Chrome, would filter out certain online ad types deemed to provide bad experiences for users as they move around the web.”
Some of the ad types that may be affected will be those defined by the Coalition For Better Ads, the article goes on to state. As far as the ad types affected, the WSJ specifies,
“According to those standards, ad formats such as pop-ups, auto-playing video ads with sound and “prestitial” ads with countdown timers are deemed to be “beneath a threshold of consumer acceptability.”
Webmasterworld members discuss the potential modus operandi of such an initiative. Member Mack suggests,
“Google may well assume they can take over the ad-block industry. Become the de facto entity then let it slide away”.
Member Lucy goes on to mention,
“But really, isn’t an ad blocker for Chrome just another of those inevitable bandwagon-following moves, like when MSIE incorporated multi-tabbed browsing because everyone else in the universe had been doing it for years?”
Member Londrum states,
“could be a good idea. every user who uses this is one less who uses another ad-blocker, which are 100 times worse for publishers because they usually just block absolutely everything, whether it’s unobtrusive or not “
Tangor quotes a comment from an article on The Register about the degree to which such an action makes Google a gatekeeper and “arbiter of taste”. The tread closes with a comment from engine that this initiative is said to come into effect in early 2018.
Google To Remove Intrusive Ads From Chrome Browser User Experience
Over on Cre8asiteforums.com, a similar discussion around Googles new expected Adblocker emerged. Some users were definitely in favor, citing that this will help control some of the more overeaching uses of ads. Other members. Some interesting comments included iamlost, who stated
“This is just an extension of the AMP approach to let in Google ads and control other networks. Take it with a shaker full of salt.”
and EGOL went on to say that,
“I think that Google is building ad blocking into their browser to squelch the enormous number of crappy ads that appear on some websites. Some sites are gentle with their ads and some sites are a little less gentle, but a lot of sites are blasting ads in your face the whole way down the page” .
Grumpus also commented that,
“Googlebot has no person behind it. A web browser does. Why hire a bunch of human reviewers when you can get the entire world to do it for you for free?”
2017 State of the Internet Trends Report
Engine posts the State Of Internet Trends Report, with commentary on how webmasters may be affected. Some highlights from the thread include
- Global smartphone and overall internet growth rate appears to have have slowed down
- Voice search now makes up to 20% of mobile queries that are performed
- Internationally, China and India remain to large growth opportunities
- Bot traffic surpassed human traffic in 2016. Although, engine notes that this has happened before and not a first time occurrence
- Internet ads will surpass television advertising in a little as six months
- The top challenge for social media is measuring ROI, member smilie suspects due to bots
- 52% of ads are PLA ads and growing exponentially, member smilie suspects that regular ads are not growing as well due to bots
- Adblocking is growing exponentially
Marketers Rate Their Conferences
cre8pc shares recent survey results for what are the most important factors for marketers, when considering going to a conference.
For cre8pc, the split between genders was most interesting, noting that the most important factors for women are cost, speakers, and location and for men, it’s cost, networking and speakers, with men choosing networking over speakers.
Members, in general, say that they do get value out of going to conferences but sometimes cost and location are restrictions that keep them from going more often.
Have you removed dates from your URLs? If so, what results have you seen?
A new user removed the dates from word press blog post URLs and experienced a dip in traffic. The user experienced a dip in organic search traffic and is wondering if they should roll this initiative out for other sites as well.
Members speak to the level of risk in changing URL structures and provide tips for when structures changes, including:
- Make sure all internal links now point to the new URLs
- If your site is small grab a free crawler and cross your site to confirm that no pages are broken and internal links are properly redirecting
NOODP No Longer Supported By Google – Getting a Good Meta Description
In their last Webmaster Central Blog, Google notified users that they will no longer be be supporting NOODP tag.
For those of you who are thinking, “What is NOODP” tag, is it is the tag specifies to Google that you do not want them to use the Open Directory Project as a reference for what they include as snippets for your site and that this tag can be removed.
Join the discussions to contribute your thoughts and read more!