Of course Google didn't make the web site bad, you did. In a purely practical sense you changed the site, not them.
Which leads us to the "why" of it. Which is you wanted to monetize the site (if only to cover its costs.) Since advertising seems to be the business model of the internet that's your first port of call.
But here's a site that performs a task. Quite who uses this site is unclear. Sure lots of people might use it (for some definition of lots) but the site doesn't really give signals to adsense.
Conversely Adsense sells ads based on "targeted users". Which means your original site is pretty useless to Adsense.
Ok,I'm simplifying here, but what ads do you think -should- be shown to your visitors? Ads derived from their browsing history of sites that do intuit user context?
Are users browsing an arbitrary rubbish website more or less likely to be distracted by some special offer? Are people visiting your site to do some very specific task, presumably for a concrete reason, more or less likely to be distracted by an ad?
The problem isn't Google. The problem is that our ability to monetize the web starts and ends with adverts. Which means that sites that "do stuff" are a bad match, and therefore lack funding.
To be honest, I don't have a cunning plan of alternate funding. Probably the only other viable one is "take some of your day-job money and effectively sponsor the site yourself." Which of course is the model you -were- on that you wanted to leave.
> Of course Google didn't make the web site bad, you did.
That's right. Whenever anybody says "X made me do Y", sometimes I get flashes of the 1980/s1990s action movie villain, in the industrial backdrop, for the violence climax scene, with the hero on the ropes, screaming hysterically "You made me do this!"
Nobody makes you do anything. That's true from a strict personal responsibility standpoint, and it's an important boundary and important to remember: it's always your choice.
But of course that's not what this is about. It's about Google providing the incentive, for ruining perfectly good websites.
And we can get weaselly and say, "Well actually it's not Google, but it's the internet - or people - or technology - or economics - or thermodynamics" But the same point remains: Google chose to do this, too.
If we are to hold one to the standard of personal responsibility while relieving another of it for reasons of context and incentive? Well that just seems unfair. Hahaha! :)
> Nobody makes you do anything. That's true from a strict personal responsibility standpoint, and it's an important boundary and important to remember: it's always your choice.
There's truth in this old chestnut but it has limits...
There's a spectrum from total freedom to pressure by incentives to the credible threat of violence. In extreme cases claiming someone "had a choice" is as ghastly as a free person claiming they had none.
At the same time, I don't take issue with the title -- I don't read it as abdicating responsibility. The author knows he can remain ad-less. It's just a catchy way to say "I had to make these changes to get approved by ad-sense."
You do always have a choice. If you surrender that you become...inhuman...I think. Because you've said: "Now this thing I've done, is not my fault." Then you go around looking for other people to blame, which makes you a monster.
To be more clear (which is useful I think): it's not your choice what the world presents to you, but you choose how you respond always.
As long as you're not unconscious of course. If your mind is there, you're choosing.
But ultimately where you come down on that is up to you. I guess it comes down to: with how much integrity do you plan to live? :)
There could be some edge cases, but it's important to remember how valid that is for the majority of experience.
I didn't start it like this, but that got dark quick hahahah! :)
>> of course that's not what this is about. It's about Google providing the incentive, for ruining perfectly good websites.
Wait,what? The author wants to monetize the site. He understands the actual users won't pay. So looking for an alternate option he turns to advertising.
Google says "hey, unfortunately your site isn't appealing to advertisers." That's not Google's fault, they're just telling the truth as they see it.
The site author has many choices at this point. One of them is to make the site better for advertisers (and worse for users). He chooses this route. Google should have stopped this how?
Are you suggesting the author's site is now better for advertisers?
My takeaway from the author's example is that Google has set up a system that is incentivising actions leading to worse outcomes for both users (frustrating search experience) and advertisers (whose ad spend is not being well spent).
Google has no incentive to improve the situation - because google has an effective monopoly.
> No. Gaming the system in bad faith was just gaming the system.
Everything you say here is true, yet misses the point.
Google search results are dominated by sites just like the one presented. This is something one no one likes - not the people doing the searches, nor the people doing the advertising and definitely (as this post shows) not the people creating the sites. They would much prefer just to put up their content without spending hours on creating LLM SEO spam. I'm sure Google is worried if they don't do better someone will they will lose relevance.
Inquiring minds what to know how we ended up here. The article provides just that. It explains how the incentives Google have put in place drove him to producing one of those sites. He wanted that ad revenue and he wanted search results to find his site and the only way he could find to do that without spending an inordinate amount of time on generating content he had no personal interest in was to pollute it with LLM spam.
You are criticising him for that, yet most web sites returned by Google all make that same choice. I guess according to you most of the web is acting in bad faith.
If your objective is to get out of this mess, I don't think explanations like "the word is shit because humanity sucks" are helpful. The explanation they are being pushed towards that choice by a perverse set of incentives is much more illuminating. Those incentives are controlled by one company - Google. That company could change them, either voluntarily or by being forced to.
> Google says "hey, unfortunately your site isn't appealing to advertisers."
1) Advertisers - plural? What other advertisers is Google referencing?
In this context, 'advertisers' means all the other meaningfully similar ad options that the author could choose from.
2) This wording: "The team has reviewed it but unfortunately your site isn’t ready to show ads at this time." is Google's clear and blatant refusal to extend their ad ~monopoly to his web page. A refusal that gets satisfied only after he loads his site up with useless, time wasting crap.
I'll grant the author did have a choice. The author could be denied access to Google's ad monopoly or he could crap up his web page.
I'm surprised no one commenting has really got this point. The truth is Google has a choice about the model it uses, Google has created the advertising industry online.
Again, you disclaim Google of any responsibility for choice but hold the author to one? Doesn't that biased difference strike you as jarring?
That's the point here. Everyone seems to complicate it; it's pretty simple.
I'm not against you specifically, I just think this is a clear issue. Admittedly, not a lot of people grasp this right now.
Google didn't 'make' the site owner change anything, there is obviously the choice not to serve ads and not change the site.
However, once the site owner decided to use Adsense then in order to use this service the site needed to change according to Google's requirements.
The point being made is that in order to serve ads the site owner had to add a lot of useless information irrelevant to what was driving traffic to the site in the first place.
Why did the first attempt get rejected, yet the final attempt after making the website objectively worse gets accepted?
The useless information that needed to be added to the site contributes to the decline in quality many people are noticing when using google search nowadays. This article provides a very interesting explanation for this decline.
Isn't that what all the tracking and analytics is supposed to determine? I thought ads were supposed to be tailored to the viewer as much (if not more than) the site.
> Conversely Adsense sells ads based on "targeted users". Which means your original site is pretty useless to Adsense.
It might have been a fair point, but AI-generated word salad was enough to make this site palatable to AdSense - but I don't see how any of it would help the AI and/or mechanical turk supposedly assigning target-demographic labels to this site.
Oh, I agree it's still a crappy site for advertising. He gamed the algorithm to get onto the program.
Of course getting into adsense isn't the goal, the goal was to make some money. But he didn't have a site worth advertising on before, and he doesn't now. I predict actual revenue will be equally turgid.
On the tracking front, sure, I mean I suppose some people go to the site. So it gets some views.
I have a road past my property which gets a few cars a day. Not sure putting up an advertising sign is useful there though...
It's really hard to know what a "steady stream" is without useful quantification. I mean to you or me a steady stream might be 100 people a day. Or a million. It's hard to say. (And clearly that would be useful knowledge in the context of evaluating the value of the site.)
On the other hand, if I was getting a million users per day, I'd probably figure out who would care about that audience, and sell to them directly.
If he’s getting paid per impression, then I don’t see how the payout will be unexpected terrible considering the site has existing traffic. Of course he could be paid by click, in which case you are probably right.
Does Adsense pay for impressions? Legit question, I have no idea... I imagine $-per-impression would be impressively low... Isn't $-per-click pretty low anyway?
Funnily enough, tools are best monetised as SEO enhancers. His tool would have incredible page rank, and by linking to a "Made with love by congressblog.com" from that tool (and all the others he has made) and then populating congressblog.com with lots of content about like, congress, he could monetise THAT site with ads. He didn't have to ruin the calculator.
EDIT: an alternative monetisation source if the OP didn't want to create a bunch of content would be affiliate links.
> Conversely Adsense sells ads based on "targeted users". Which means your original site is pretty useless to Adsense.
But how is the updated site any better? It surely must be, since it made it past the review, right? The whole post just shows how ridiculous and flawed the review process is and what it leads to.
Well firstly, I'm not sure the site author knows the demographic. I'm pretty sure he doesn't ask that sort of thing before doing the calculation.
Secondly the way Google determines the demographic is via the site content.
Or to put it another way; site owners don't have a "right" to Adsense. Google is clearly allowed to choose those sites it considers "to be good advertising sites".
Therefore if you have a site that doesn't offer good advertising opportunities, then don't be surprised if people don't want to advertise on it.
To be clear, I'm not saying all sites should be ad friendly. I'm saying that advertising alone cannot prop up every site, useful or not.
Google has a monopoly though. Multiple monopolies even.
If Google had competition in the ads space, this would be less of an issue, as the author could pick an advertiser that works for their website, rather than contorting their website for google
Tell me more about the advertising potential an alternative advertiser would see in this site?
Or to put it another way, what product should this be advertising on this site? Because there are a lot of companies in the world, so of you can identify just one of them, they'll likely pay enough for exclusivity.
I would think this tool is useful for students or journalists. Grammarly and other writing tools would be relevant. Obviously, people who are interested in government or politics, so political ads are hugely relevant.
Cause then everyone tells Google that their demographic is the one that shows ads that pay the best.
Though people are doing that with SEO anyway so it is a weird game.
I think maybe all ads would need to be the same value to fix a lot of the nonsense. But I don't know if that could ever work, especially with how seasonal ad revenue is.
If everyone that wants to scam Google just says they have whatever audience pays best, that should result in lots of slots for that audience. Somehow that should tank the price, right?
Then, ban pages that change their audience too often.
Why can't we use some sort of metadata tagging system instead? Isn't this what the person is indirectly trying to do: declare some simple tags, such as "US politics", but indirectly via a bunch of garbage fed into an auto-tagger?
Not to put too fine a point on it, but (1) we did once[1], because you're right that it seems like an obvious fit. But in practice (2) it got absolutely crushed in the market performance-wise by more sophisticated algorithms like Facebook's and Google's (Amazon plays in this world too, though they have an easier space to search). It turns out that the fundamental game in the ad world isn't serving ads that site administrators and content creators think their users want to see, it's figuring out what the users of that content actually want and showing them that instead.
And indeed, that cuts the site operator out of the loop, and forces them (if they want to make money from these ad algorithms) to design a site that will attract users with easily-intuited advertising needs. And the linked article doesn't have that.
[1] And still do in parallel niche markets like porn.
It wasn't just the meta tags that were abused. People were adding text into invisible elements, or text as the same color as the background, etc. This was the precursor to SEO and ads really, and just people trying to get listed higher in search.
As soon as it can be gamed, it will be gamed. It's just the scammy nature of it all. Now that it's "AI" generated content, it will get to enshitified almost immediately on any system that is created
We tried that. It just lead to sites adding a million meta words to gather as much advertising as possible.
But, as a thought exercise. Let's say you were selling ads directly to the business paying. Which businesses do you suppose might be interested on a congressional apportionment calculator?
> Which businesses do you suppose might be interested on a congressional apportionment calculator?
Political ads? Campaign ads?
Newspapers advertising that they've got the fastest election news?
People looking for an apportionment calculator are likely interested in a past or future election and interested in political topics. That's a lot of potential ads you could show.
Indeed, selling ads like this directly is the old school way of doing it.
But even on YouTube it's back nowadays, most YouTubers get their money from sponsorships which work just the same as old-school pre-internet ad placement.
Google has been sending me emails about how things are preventing them from indexing my websites,and recently I've stopped caring.
My website and it's content is what it is, and its not my job to make Google more valuable. They're a multi billion dollar company, if it's really a problem, they can figure it out.
> Ok,I'm simplifying here, but what ads do you think -should- be shown to your visitors? Ads derived from their browsing history of sites that do intuit user context?
Political ads? Ads targeted towards Americans (think cereal or whatever else why might see on national TV)? Crappy low-paying ads that aren't significantly targeted? Literally anything?
You're arguing Google has sensible motives. That doesn't particularly matter. What matters is what they encourage website owners to do in practice. Apparently that is to fill your website with worthless junk text.
My point is that Google has sensible motives, and that people with perfectly good sites will butcher them in the hope of making a buck, and then blame Google.
Google doesn't "encourage" people to butcher their site. Google has determined the kind of property they want to advertise on.
The owners of the site make their own choices. If they choose to game the review process then that's on them, not Google.
The owner now has a crappy site, which is still a bad place for ads (although the review doesn't know it.) The ultimate goal, of getting revenue, is perhaps still unrealized.
Google has sensible motives but, undoubtedly owing to a lack of strong competition, they are not very good at serving these motives.
The fact that AdSense can be gamed incentives gaming. Unlike Google, websites like these DO have competition, and so the ones that game the system most effectively make profits and the ones that operate most ethically go out of business.
If Google does not want AdSense to be gamed, they should close the loopholes that make it so easily gameable and that punish honest customers. However, they are not strongly incentivized to do this because neither websites nor advertisers have any good altetnatives, so they aren't meaningfully losing business over it. And so funds that could go toward fixing this are, instead, used in areas that need the funding more urgently.
Assigning fault here is silly. The websites could be better AND Google could be better — but they will not become better without the right incentive structure.
Google knows who the visitor is, what ads they clicked before and so on. They also know the search terms the site ranks for. What is on the site is just one clue as to what to serve.
Point here though is that author shouldn't have had to add the extra stuff.
There was ONE actual core piece of functionality they wanted to monetize, so why not?
By adding random crap, author was able to get it approved.
This just proves how everything is turning into the Internet Of Shit - or Enshitification. I loved how the article exposes this in context of the ad networks --- on which Google has an effective monopoly.
Which leads us to the "why" of it. Which is you wanted to monetize the site (if only to cover its costs.) Since advertising seems to be the business model of the internet that's your first port of call.
But here's a site that performs a task. Quite who uses this site is unclear. Sure lots of people might use it (for some definition of lots) but the site doesn't really give signals to adsense.
Conversely Adsense sells ads based on "targeted users". Which means your original site is pretty useless to Adsense.
Ok,I'm simplifying here, but what ads do you think -should- be shown to your visitors? Ads derived from their browsing history of sites that do intuit user context?
Are users browsing an arbitrary rubbish website more or less likely to be distracted by some special offer? Are people visiting your site to do some very specific task, presumably for a concrete reason, more or less likely to be distracted by an ad?
The problem isn't Google. The problem is that our ability to monetize the web starts and ends with adverts. Which means that sites that "do stuff" are a bad match, and therefore lack funding.
To be honest, I don't have a cunning plan of alternate funding. Probably the only other viable one is "take some of your day-job money and effectively sponsor the site yourself." Which of course is the model you -were- on that you wanted to leave.