New SERP Layout

[payattention]

This is only on google.com ATM, not AU but look at how prominent the adverts are now. They only shifted the results further towards the left 12-18 months back and now it looks like they might be doing it again. I strongly believe they use trickery such as the "ads related to credit cards" text, huge gaps between listings, 1,000,000 etc results on it own line, images + maps etc etc appearing twice in order to push organic further down.

Just having a bitch..

.com.au for comparison

 

[findtim]

i get a similar result, the
"3,134 people +1'd or follow CommBank" shits me

who cares google +1? like no one has ever heard of commbank

all its doing is taking up another couple of millimetres pushing down my organic result.

tim

 

[Chris.C]

Squeezing a few more CTR percentage points out of those ads...

 

[snoopy]

Not sure how any of this is trickery? It is in Google interest to positions the paid results as prominently as possible. For something like credit cards why should there even be an organic section?

There is banks & aggregators in the paid section and bank & aggregators in the organic section, it is is the same stuff except one section depends on paying someone for SEO and the other depends on paying Google.

 

[payattention]

I call it trickery because each incremental change over the past few years has been made to increase the CTR of the ads under the guise of improving user experience but at this point it's blatantly obvious what these minor changes are intended to do where as it wasn't so much before.. the rub is that they penalise other websites for engaging in the same practice.

As I said in the OP, I was just having a bitch (sour grapes). All these little changes hurt over time but if Google was my own little home office gig, page 1 would be Adwords only where possible and I'd move organic results to page 2.

 

[James]

They have been playing around with this layout since around September in the US market, only fully rolled out today, hope it does not turn out into AD central like the example I gave here - http://jamesnorquay.com/could-new-google-layout-look-like-this/