All of the major search engines have at some point claimed good user experience is at the forefront of their efforts and Google are no different; in fact they are probably the engine to crack down the hardest on black hat SEO techniques to this end where natural rankings are concerned.
But there is a second battle against poor quality, spam-ridden sites that Google has yet to win. Right now on Google Adwords anyone can reach the top of the listings, albeit the sponsored listings, by simply creating a great ad, bidding high enough and building a page that Google considers to be of significance with regards to the search query and ad.
It happens to be that third step in the process that is leading to what is, in my opinion, a poor experience for their search users. I myself often take advantage of the sponsored listings on Google thanks to their normally pinpoint targeting of my needs, but there are times when I find myself on a page full of regurgitated ads from other networks such as Yahoo or Infospace (the company behind Dogpile) and this is happening on an increasingly regular basis.
These sites avoid Google Quality Score penalties because the landing pages they build have good keyword density, partly down to the adverts they list but also because of the common practice of writing keyword rich content and making Google’s bot see it first in the page code thanks to some handy CSS tricks.
I, like many others I can only assume, swiftly hit the back button on my browser but since many internet users are not quite as savvy, these advert covered sites duly sit back and reap the financial rewards of click arbitrage. But Google, and other search engines, can fight back.
If my suspicion is true, and a good proportion of searchers bounce swiftly from the sites in question then it should not be too hard to send these listings right down to page 10 obscurity. If Google could factor in the time spent on a page into their Adwords Quality Score then targeted and genuinely useful sites would see their ads leapfrog the offending spam and Google would have their user experience boosted considerably.
Clearly their should be a threshold time limit, beyond which a page is considered relevant, because different sites will, by nature, lead to variations in the time a user spends on a page. But what I can safely say is that if a person spends less than 10 seconds on a page it is not what they were looking for.
Google almost definitely have the ability to clock these Adwords visits and thus the implementation of this idea is within their abilities, while preventing abuse of this factor should be possible. Plus, as an added benefit companies will be forced into thinking more about user experience and design to prevent bounces from their site.
All in all something as simple as time could be responsible for a better search experience for everybody.
