• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
Prospect Genius Reviews

Prospect Genius Reviews

Reviewing digital marketing tools and services for local businesses

  • Home
  • Reviews
  • Contact Us
You are here: Home / Prospect Genius Reviews... / Prospect Genius Reviews: Google’s Sponsored Ads

Prospect Genius Reviews: Google’s Sponsored Ads

October 20, 2014 by

Users turn to Google for helpful consumer research and general information about virtually any subject. All they want is to find relevant webpages with valuable content, but Google’s sponsored advertisements— the ones that businesses pay Google to display in high-profile positions— are making it harder to do so. In this edition of “Prospect Genius Reviews…,” we’ll discuss the increasingly pervasive nature of Google’s sponsored ads and its implications.

Lately, Google’s search results pages are getting more and more crowded by sponsored advertisements (seen at the top and to the right of the search results). You may not think anything of their presence— probably because we’ve all grown accustomed to being bombarded by advertisements everywhere we go on the web— but they actually signify a disconcerting shift in Google’s practices.

What is that shift? Essentially, Google is gradually moving away from their “relevant content is king” mantra and adopting a pay-to-play model. While most of the space on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) used to be reserved for the top organic results, a large portion of that space is now taken up by paid advertisements.

Mike Blumenthal, one of the local search industry’s chief experts, wrote an illuminating article about one of the latest batches of Google’s search results testing. In it, he discusses the disproportionate ratio of sponsored results to organic and local results, and he drew this conclusion: “I guess that Google has finally given up on any form of local listing or organic page relevance and has decided that relevance is a function of payment.”

In other words, content is no longer king— money is. People looking for relevant, valuable information about a topic will become less and less likely to find the webpages they actually need because a large portion of the results will be sponsored.

Prospect Genius reviews this preferential treatment of sponsored results very negatively, but that doesn’t mean we’re surprised by it. We’ve known for years that Google would continue pushing out the organic sections of the SERPs in favor of paid sections because there’s a significant profit motive to do so. As long as Google is getting paid, it doesn’t worry too much about the quality of the results it’s providing. In fact, a couple of years ago, Google even tried to sell tags and highlights for Maps listings as an attempt to monetize the Maps sections. Although that particular plan didn’t last long, Google hasn’t been deterred. Now, as it merges the mobile and desktop versions of the SERPs, we’re seeing big, chunky objects taking up screen real estate that could otherwise be occupied by organic results; at the same time, it’s expanding the paid sections to look more like the traditional Maps listings. As paid ads crowd out real, organic results on Google’s results pages, we predict that the average user is going to feel more and more alienated.

As distasteful as we find Google’s practices, we hope it continues to alienate the general public so that its market share diminishes, thus making room for Bing and other search engines to compete. The only reason Google has been able to get away with these kinds of activities in the first place is because it has a monopoly over the search engine industry, so if it’s finally knocked down a few pegs by its own hubris, the search engine landscape will be all the better for it.

Next time on “Prospect Genius Reviews…,” we’ll take a look at Angie’s List and discuss how beneficial it actually is for small, local businesses.

Filed Under: Prospect Genius Reviews... Tagged With: Google AdWords, Organic results, ppc, Prospect Genius reviews, search results pages, sponsored results

Search our Reviews

Review Archives

  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014

What Drives Us?

Our passion is helping small businesses thrive. It’s why we get out of bed every day. Too many business owners are cheated and lied to every day so we see it as our duty to be a beacon of truth, a safe harbor, in an often unscrupulous industry.

Search

Review Archives

Connect With Us

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Phone
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

Contact Us

Prospect Genius
279 Troy Rd
Ste 9 #102
Rensselaer, NY 12144

P: (800) 689-1273
F: (888) 488-9011
E: hello@prospectgenius.com

Serving Since

Copyright ProspectGenius and 2023