Search Engine Optimisation BlackDog

This morning I was doing my regular check of SERPs, and noticed that there was a marked increased in traffic yesterday for one of my domains, jobs in ireland. It got me thinking philosophically this morning, that one man’s gain is another man’s loss when it comes to Search Engine Rankings Positions. A classical zero sum game, people are going to search, and click roughly the same number of links, it’s irrelevant to a searcher the order, as they think that that’s just the way it is. They will click the first one, if they don’t find what they need, they will go back and search again and click the second link.

While I was mussing about a blog post. and checking into the SERPs I was happy to see that we were indeed at #4 & #6 on google.com & google.ie for [jobs in ireland]. But I was abruptly awoken and was in shock when I was trying to check our position visually. It wasn’t easy to see where what’s what, as Google has started to blend in paid ads in with the SERPs.

Where are the ads ?

Click for larger image

This is the picture that is showing up, and those distinctive yellow ads are no where to be seen ? How can a visitor discern the difference between paid and organic listings ? Just for the record these are the ads …

And the side bar ads

Why these ads ?

We doubt it’s for UI that Google is putting these ads in white, rather they are just simply trying to increase their click through ads. And the result will mean :

• More ads clicked
• More money for Google
• More traffic for advertisers
• Less traffic for organic rankers

A good day for Google ? I think not. Yet another reason to pick another search engine right now. I’m currently testing duckduckgo.com for the last few weeks and the results are pretty good so far. And they show you what are paid listings and what are organic listings.
Rant Over