Google plans to punish fake news

Google has announced that it intends to restrict where adverts are allowed to be placed.

Since the US election technology companies have been put under increased scrutiny amid allegations that some Silicon Valley companies failed to protect their users from inaccurate content.

A Google spokeswoman said: “Moving forward, we will restrict ad serving on pages that misrepresent, or conceal information about the publisher, the publishers content or the primary purpose of the web property.”

Last Monday, a fake story that claimed Trump had received 700,000 votes more than Hillary Clinton was given a prominent slot in the Google rankings for the phrase “final election results”.

The article was produced by the pro-Trump site “70 News”. Although Trump won the presidency after receiving more College votes Clinton did get more votes overall.

Generally we’re seeing an increasing trend of Google taking a much more proactive stance on the content they display. Where their policy used to simply be one of shifting blame to the third party they are now starting to take a much more traditional attitude. After all snippets of this content does essentially sit under their logo.

Watch this space…

Mobile sites using intrusive pop-ups to be penalised

Over the last few years Google have been on a mission to make it easier for users to access information on the move. They've made multiple announcements in order to "encourage" webmasters to make their sites more mobile friendly. It therefore does not come as much of a shock that they're now altering their algorithm again to penalise elements of mobile sites, namely pop-ups.

From January 10 2017 Google has announced that they will be downgrading sites that use intrusive interstitials, aka pop-ups. They will be penalizing sites that use excessive pop-ups by lowering their rankings in the mobile search results.

Normally Google just make changes and and don't notify users of it. On that basis this should be taken pretty seriously.

This update is considered to to be part two of google's mobile friendly drive. We blogged about Google's Mobile Friendly Algorithm changes back in April 2015 when the first part was released.