After seeing several thousand news stories and blog posts about the $1 billion investment Google made in Time Warner’s AOL, Google has come out to address some of the more hotly-debated issues about the deal.
Do you think the press, from the New York Times on down, got things like graphical ads in Google search results wrong? Could that have simply been a “trial balloon” that got shot down once feedback came in about those ads? Float your ideas about it at WebProWorld.
First of all, the deal with AOL is a partnership, Google’s Marissa Miller explained in the latest Official Google Blog post. She touched on several topics related to search results and advertising.
Miller wrote that AOL content won’t get better SERP placement just because they are a business partner. ” If a partner’s page ranks high, it’s because they have a good answer to your search,” she said.
That $300 million credit AOL gets as part of the partnership is just that, a credit, and won’t affect the ad auction. “We don’t offer preferential treatment on advertising (in either the auction or the display) to any of our partners,” she said. That goes for placement in the “onebox” containing additional links for certain search results.
As to the many discussions about graphic ads appearing in Google’s search results, that’s not happening either:
There will be no banner ads on the Google homepage or web search results pages. There will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever.
Google is going to work with AOL to better help them get their content indexed. As it does with other companies, Google will explain how its crawler works and how to use robots.txt, redirects, etc, to make sure content can be found.
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David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
