What’s wrong with the picture below?
“What’s wrong with this picture?” is a game that used to appear in the kids comics I read when I was a kid. It would be a cartoon drawing showing, say, a car with no wheels. In the snapshot below we have a picture of a different page of this web site. So why have I put it here?
I’m going to spoil the fun by telling you immediately. As I’m sure you know Google examines the text of a page and selects adverts to place in the space you make available for it. Notice that here, Google has not put adverts for cremations next to the page. There’s a reason for that. If you try to find that web page using a Google search you’ll not have much luck finding it directly, but you can find a link to it from another page on this blog, because Google has indexed that link, but not the original page.
Why has Google not indexed this page?
That will probably be because the page is nearly a year old and no longer attracts traffic, except by accident. No other web site linked to it. Google once did index this page. When it did so, it did put cremation ads on the right side of the page. However, you will note that the article here is rather critical of the Neptune Society (Austin, Texas) for its contest to win a pre-paid cremation. However, Google’s advertising algorithm clearly had no inkling of that fact, so for a few weeks it happily placed a Google Ad for the Neptune Society (Austin, Texas) right next to the posting.
As you can see in the above snapshot, because Google’s advertising algorithm has no information at all on this page, it has done something very strange indeed. It has placed a mixture of adverts that mention vampires and adverts that mention SOA. Clearly, every service oriented vampire that visits this page is going to click obsessively on these ads.
But why has Google behaved like that?
Well I’m guessing, but here’s a credible theory: The page that I came to the cremation posting from was The Truth About Michael Phelps, which describes my encounter with an Eastern European, who believed that Michael Phelps was a vampire. So I suspect Google threw the vampire ads in because it was partly using its ad placement criteria from the previous page displayed and it was merging that with the general criterion that this site publishes articles on SOA related topics.
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