There is a brand new change on google adwords and google search engine and it’s not great. Google has removed all Paid per Click (PPC) ads from the right-hand side of the search engine results page and there are now four paid search results at the top, with nothing on the right and then more paid ads (up to 3) at the bottom. It looks oddly blank now on the right and you don’t see any organic searches unless you scroll down past the paid adverts.
See how the change looks; Here’s a search for ‘london hotel’ carried out two days ago…
And here is the same search today – completely blank on the right hand side …
I don’t know about you, but I find this really irritating for these reasons.
- If you are using Google Adwords it will make it harder and more expensive to get on the first page as you can no longer be featured on the right .
- If you aren’t using Google adwords and your website is high on organic search, you will now show up mush lower than you did before. Even if you are No 1 on the search page, you will now only show up as No 4 or 5 if there are people paying for ads.
- When searching for things on google the first 3 or 4 results are paid adverts so are not the most relevant to the search. Now we have to scroll past more to reach them and most people don’t realise that those are adverts.
Google’s decision appears to be entirely commercially driven, and it is probably due to the fact that most people are viewing google on their phones and so don’t see the adverts on the side at all so they not earning as much as they want to.
This will be fine for the big companies that can afford to pay to be in the top four and the smaller companies who rely on the cheaper traffic will not be able to compete. In the long run, I wonder if this will backfire on Google as the sidebar advertisers give up rather than attempt to compete. This will put less pressure on the top of page advertisers to bid high, and ultimately could end in lower CPCs. Hopefully this will be the case and they’ll change it back again to how it was before.
Here’s an example: when I tried searching for one of our websites ‘Stretch tents St Ives Cornwall’ (which is quite specific) the first 3 results are all stretch tents that are not in Cornwall and then our website ‘Jabula Tents’ is the first organic search result.
See how Jabula Tents info is highlighted on the right because it is showing up on Google places.
Here’s another example using one of our websites which shows what it looks like when no-one has paid for advertising. What a joy! First place organic search and showing up on the right under Google places.
This shows how important it is that your details and website are on Google Places – we can help with this if you aren’t showing up.
