I have recently been working on a new auction based ads system, which I am trialling on my Dark Knight blog (http://batman-dark-knight.moviechronicles.com/).
The ad system shows keyword targeted auctions that I am attempting to make relevant to the readers. It is all generated via PHP (with a plan to move to javascript later). This has been working successfully with high click through rates, etc. You’ll notice however that the auctions no longer have descriptions associated with them.
On Sunday evening I noticed that my search engine rank had fallen from the first page for a popular search term to around the 70 mark. Looking at Google’s cache, it seems that when the bot came around, multiple different auctions, each with the same description, were showing. Whilst the auctions themselves were unique with text accurately and helpfully describing the product, the repetition of this description so close together must have given Google the impression of keyword stuffing, which is a side effect I had never intended.
Hence the descriptions were removed. Ultimately, removing this description reduces the effectiveness of the ads and CTR, it isn’t something I want to make permanent.
Is there a specific way of telling Google bot not to look at parts of a page? I’d like to say something along the lines of “this is legitimate content and not keyword spam” and hence, “don’t use this bit in your algorithm”.
The other alternate is to load the text in dynamically. But my methods are legitimate and my content respectable – I shouldn’t have to change my page specifically to improve search engine ranking, especially when this is something Google actively discourages. |
You could use iframes for displaying such stuff. As for the AdSense bot, there's also a special tag for it. I think it goes like this:
<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->
stuff you don't like to be read for context matching the AdSense...
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=23168 |
Yahoo announced that they were introducing something like this earlier this year: http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000444.html
Basically, you add a "robots-nocontent" class to content you don't want indexing. |
