Not having ever used either Google AdSense or AdWords, I only understand half the bare bones of it (if that), but it reaffirms my long-held impression of web ad-tracking Black Magick. Towards the end author Rick Strahl has this to say:

"[...] just this last week Google announced that they are actually going to punish publishers who publish large pages (ie. likely REAL content that is useful and not cut up to maximize ad revenue) by weighting down pages that are long (in terms of content size) and reduce them in search priority. So much for 'only do good'. Corporate crap like anybody else.

How did we get here? The advertising means have become an end in itself that now outweighs the original premise for many operations. [...]"

Cherish/ get angry at the rest of it + comments here:
http://west-wind.com/WebLog/posts/302826.aspx

> Google announced that they are actually going to punish
> publishers who publish large pages

Where did Google make this announcement?

Loading time for landing pages is a new factor for calculating the quality score of an ad.

There are times when I like a large long page, but I'm also beginning to like tutorials that are 5 separate pages. It actually gives the web owner a better pageview rate and it can give you a feeling of progress, or of where you're at in the process.

binaries4all's powerpost tutorials are a decent example: binaries4all.com/powerpost/

and if it's going to be something I'll need to do again and again, like the advanced bash shell scripting guide, http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/, frankly I want it in PDF so I can just save it down and refer back to it without having to search for it again, or to find it has been poorly updated, etc.

And loading time has always been huge to google. 0.2 seconds baby.

Dan

> ...Loading time for landing pages...

That refers to loading time for the target of an AdWords ad, so it's not a concern for me.

The quote posted by IanF referred to the long pages dropping down the search results, and I haven't seen anything which could count as Google "announcing" that they are going to do that.

Roger Browne's "Where did Google make this announcement?"

Isn't it kind of rhetorical asking for clarification of this here, rather than straight from that claimer/ claimant/ claimee rhetorical question (tricky this, language).

Ianf: Well, this is a discussion forum. If someone re-posts an unsubstantiated claim here, it's (in my opinion) reasonable to discuss the validity of that claim here.

If, indeed, "Google announced that they are actually going to punish publishers who publish large pages", I'm sure someone at this forum would know about it.

But I'm not undertaking to correct errors wherever they may occur on the internet. That path leads to madness...

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/duty_calls.png
(Creative Commons AT-NC) http://xkcd.com/386/

xkcd is brilliant. you're not getting their mouse-over effect though. I've never looked into just how they do that, but thought I'd mention it. And you're right, you can't fix the world.

Daniel: > I've never looked into just how they do that

To get that mouse-over effect, just add a TITLE attribute to the IMG tag.

At the end of the day,

Where do you suppose Google is getting average load time information??

Google analytics??