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Commecial sites relegated to Adwords?

Is Google dropping commercial sites in order to increase revenue?

         

SuperSport

3:59 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Like many experiencing the 'Florida' syndrome, my site was hit hard early this week, basically disappearing from Google for all of my keywords. As I have been extremely careful not to do anything foolish that would get me banned I was flabbergasted at the sudden disappearance.

Once I calmed down however, I realized that many, if not the almost all of my competitors suffered the same fate. If you punch in some of the most popular keywords for my industry (services oriented) you will see that the results you get currently on Google's live site are almost all non-commercial sites in the top 30. For example, you get enthusiast sites who mention my service industry with some links, but no actual providers are showing up.

This puzzled me for a short time, and I was thinking that Google was in chaos, not providing relevant links. Then, it struck me. Why wouldn't Google wipe out organic results for commercial sites and basically force them to use AdWords. In my industry, many terms are going for $3+ on Adwords and Overture. Google is losing some serious $$ to the top five or six organically placed companies. Why not remove them from the listings under the guise of 'search purity' in order to both convince end-users that they are getting better, non-commercial laden results as well as seriously fattening their bottom line with increased AdWord revenue as the commecial sites are forced to use this avenue (Adwords) to drive customers to their site. It is a win-win for Google and a lose-lose for commercial sites. I am concerned.