Robert_Charlton - 9:38 pm on Sep 13, 2011 (gmt 0)

Matt posts in the blogoscoped thread that he had never seen the tool. The original blogoscoped post appended a statement from Google that I'll quote in part...

The screenshot shows a tool that is not used by the search quality team in any way. It is a tool used by members of our AdWords sales team to help prioritize new customer acquisition. We are strongly committed to maintaining the integrity of our organic search results.

I think it would be a handy tool for a SEO to have. I can also understand why Matt had never seen it.

Every 15 year wanting to make an MFA site knows.

Yes, I agree, and I look at the ads as one factor among many when I analyze keywords for SEO. Rand's original Keyword Difficulty tool used PPC competition and pricing as one of its factors (I don't know about more recent versions of the tool, but I'm sure it's still in there).

That said, Matt is not a 15 year old wanting to make an MFA site. Many good arguments have been made in this forum about the reasons that Google keeps its advertising and search teams separate, and I'm not going to repeat them.

I will say that I don't think that factoring AdWords pricing into organic rankings would be beneficial to Google's user satisfaction, and for that reason alone it's likely that Google doesn't look at advertiser cost when ranking sites.

Looking at AdWords pricing when countering spam may be one line of approach, but it's so likely that other metrics are even more useful to the spam team that I don't think they need to cross the line to look.