AdCenter to Penalise Aggregators?

At the recent AdChamps event in London there was a great deal of talk about improving the quality of the search results pages and much of that talk was focussed on the issue of aggregators, price comparison sites and consolidators.

Depending on which side of the fence you’re sitting on the news that AdCenter are to start penalising aggregators with higher click costs will come as quite a shock. I guess it depends on your (or rather Adcenter’s) definition of an aggregator.

Undoubtedly the ads-to-ads pages that simply link from AdCenter to Google Adsense listings are irritating to say the least but what about sites like TravelSupermarket that allow consumers to compare prices from different operators in what is an incredibly fluid marketplace? The popularity of these sites surely indicates that consumers find them to be of real value.

The travel industry in particular is full of consolidators and aggregators of tour operator product. It’ll be interesting to see how AdCenter apply this new quality algorithm and the effect it has on comparison sites including MSN’s own aggregator MSN Shopping!

To be fair to the AdCenter team, the motivation appears to genuinely be to increase the user experience but I guess squeezing extra cash out of high spending accounts such as MoneySupermarket won’t hurt either.