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The post florida G returns information sites for a commercial search in some areas. Why not just accept that commmercial searches should return commercial results? This is better for the people who want to buy.
But they may do this indirectly, and for good reasons. If the boss tells the programmers to code to better fight spam, that is mostly going to affect commercial sites. Teenagers don't commonly use spamming techniques on their home pages. However many (and, I do just mean "many", and not "all") commercial webmasters push the envelope when it comes to spamming. The line between spamming and "honest" SEO is all kinds of fuzzy. Google may have moved that line.
You're assuming that ranking occurs by using only text analysis..you need to think "document"..pretty easy peasy to spot aff links.
>It may be emotionally satisfying to accuse Google of filtering its search results to increase revenues from AdWords, but so far nobody has supplied any proof for such allegations.
We do have proof that commercial results are treated differently; do you think froogle links appear at the top of SERPs on a random basis?
Do you see any froogle pages w/o Adwords?
Things get trickier when an algorithm has to determine whether a page is an "affiliate site page" or an "information page" with an affiliate link.
You're assuming that ranking occurs by using only text analysis..you need to think "document"..pretty easy peasy to spot aff links.
Sure, affiliate links are easy to spot. But non-commercial (i.e., information) pages often have affiliate links. The challenge is in how to differentiate a noncommercial page with an affiliate link from an affiliate e-commerce page.
We do have proof that commercial results are treated differently...
I wasn't commenting on whether commercial pages are treated differently; I was commenting on the assertion that such treatment (assuming that it exists) is motivated by a desire to sell more AdWords. IMHO, Google's primary motivation is a desire to maximize the quality of its core product (information search) so that users will keep coming back. Advertising revenues are obviously important to most media businesses, but ad sales depend on the ability to deliver an audience (not the other way around).
