Google Loves Low Quality Sites

As a follow-up to yesterday's Google rant, I wanted to follow-up and show you how Google is breaking it's own definition of quality scoring. And filling its natural results with sites that it wouldn't even accept for Adwords bidding.

Let's go through this slowly.

According to Adwords help:

 The following website types will sometimes merit low landing page quality scores and may be difficult to advertise affordably. If you choose to advertise one of these website types, be particularly careful to adhere to our landing page quality guidelines - especially the rule about offering unique content.

• eBooks that show frequent ads
• 'Get rich quick' sites
• Comparison shopping sites
• Travel aggregators
• Affiliates that don't comply with our affiliate guidelines

So, google is saying that if you are a comparison shopping engine and you want to bid on Adwords, your money isn't welcome because the site is of "low quality" to searchers. But apparently, the main index falls under no such restraints. This usually involves paying about $10 per click instead of 30 cents or whatever as punishment for having a "low quality" site. Hence the fact that not many of comparison sites buy keywords any longer.

Let's take a search for a product I carry -  Flip Flop Stepping Stones - since I carry about it. I do not pretend to be the #1 search for the item but if someone is searching for "flip flop stepping stones" - I carry them and sell them and always have them in stock. Also, apparently do many other sites (copycats! LOL)

But let's see what Google think. You'll need to click this picture to get the full effect, I'm sure:

As you can see, more than half of the google results for this relatively minor product search are comparison shopping engines. Does Google really think that people use their engine to go to other engines to find what they want to find? Or does Google think that searches use them to reach the most relevant results - and buy their product or get the information they requested? Judging by this search, Google thinks people love searching without finding any actual results. I suppose, next, we'll have Google indexing MSN results and Yahoo results as an attempt to further "improve" the results.

Well, yesterday we did discover that Google just recently realized that people talk out of their ass most of the time; so I guess we can forgive them of not understanding the internet or its users; again.

Also, what this tells me is that Google is putting more thought into their paid listings than their natural listings; which it continues to pretend is their number one priority. I think these types of searches tell us that this is not even close to the case.

I, for one, do not believe that: Amazon, E-Bay, Walmart, Target, etal should ever appear in search results. People know these brands - and will go right to them first, anyways. Google should be profiling smaller sites when it comes to many non-academic and non-informational searches.  But, let's say that Google disagrees and thinks that comparison shopping searches are relevant to their users. 10 out of the 16 entries here are comparison sites (or EBay) - each, I'll guarantee you - are 90-95% similar to each other.

Once more, Answers is #1. Answers uses Dealtime's data for the page. So it's content isn't even unique. It's ripped off of Dealtime. Even the main site of Answers rips most of its content from Wikipedia and other sources as well. Yet ranks #1, while providing nothing unique to the world at all? Is this what Google has come to? The site which Answers gets its content from is buried at 17 or something, while it ranks #1? Shame. Google. Shame.

These sites wouldn't even pass a quality control of your Adwords program, yet are perfectly acceptable to your natural listings. Shameful.  Thanks for a further understanding as to where your priorities lie.