Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Google makes ads more difficult to recognize

I was searching for Yu-Gi-Oh card information and clicked on the first organic link I found, like I usually do.




The page I arrived to was an MFA (made for adsense) site. I thought gee, how is it possible that an MFA site got such a high pagerank that they could be the first result?

At first I thought there must be some new SEO trick out there, but then I noticed that what I had clicked on was in fact an advertisement. They used to be separated with a different color but now seem to have a white background like other search results. Aligned to the right there is a "sponsored link" disclaimer, but on a wide screen it is easy to miss.