If you have done a search recently and pressed the back button after a short time, then Google will add the phrase Block all (website name) results underneath that site in the search results, enabling you to weed out unhelpful sites.
For too long internet marketers have been allowed to publish low quality sites that waste people’s time when searching. Google obviously want to be the best search engine and keep its loyal users, and is always thinking up new ways to improve.
They first began delisting one-page sites, and sites that had very little content, and sites that had a high bounce rate (people clicking the Back button). They made Adwords more expensive for low quality sites and for the last few years they have been intent on forcing as many people as possible to have a Google account. One of the ways they have done this is by buying YouTube and eventually only making it possible to login to YouTube using a Google account. They know practically everyone has a YouTube account, so that was a very smart move. What wasn’t clear was why they needed to have this world domonation regarding Google accounts. Of course the more people that use Google, the more advertising revenue they will gain, but now that this new feature of blocking unhelpful sites is only available to those signed into their Google accounts, it makes a lot more sense.
So has internet marketing just got harder? No. It’s just got easier. For me and other people who like to publish decent quality sites, at least. I’m interested to see if the site above me in one of my niches will be booted off the number one spot. The only reason they are there, is that they have the main keyword in the domain, and they got it as soon as the product became popular. It’s a one-page low quality site and has zero backlinks. It’s also by someone I’ve met who I thought knew better. I always set out to build sites that I would not be ashamed to show anyone at all, and I believe I have achieved that. I doubt my visitor stats will significantly reduce, but I’ll be watching them anyway, in case Google does want to tell me something.
But for many internet and affiliate marketers, it might be different, and things will become a lot harder. They will either be forced to improve the quality of their sites, or they will find easier ways (black hat and often short term ways) of making money. I know several people who were forced back into regular employment after their made-for-Adsense sites plummeted in 2006-7. You could always spot these sites, as the articles on them had been churned around with software so much, they just didn’t even make sense to readers. Now maybe another wave of marketers will be forced to try another career, or make the decision to do internet marketing properly.
One thing I am eager to find out is the effect on sites with exit pop-ups. I currently don’t have any, but I was planning to have a single one on some sites, as they have so far given the site owners an added way of collecting details for list building, or selling a cheaper product, rather than lose the customer altogether. But a lot of people hate the exit pop-up experience, especially if one site has several of them. It is currently a trend for Clickbank products to have about three or four exit popups, which I find ridiculous. I am willing to bet that this trend will have to be curbed, as users will become so annoyed at not being able to leave a website, they will be only too happy to block it in future.
