The site in question has no original content to speak of and simply links to all of their supplier's sites. I'm not sure, but I suspect that this same site may have caused the majority of supplier's to also receive a PR0 penalty.
I realize business is business and that the adwords campaigns have a different set of criteria at Google to the regular SERPS ... but wouldn't you think that before accepting the ad, Google would require webmasters to clean up their act before putting an ad recommending a site which Google themselves have punished for obvious reasons?
Is this asking too much??? Am I being naive (again)?
Yes :)
I'd be interested to know where the ad appears in the list [assuming there is more than one ad displayed], is it at the top or the bottom?
I expected as much (the naive thing has haunted me all my life :)) ... it depends upon what you search for. Sometimes their ad is at the top of three or 4 and sometimes in the middle or at the bottom.
It just seemed odd to me that they would accept an ad but not the site in the SERPS. I guess its true ... money really can buy anything!
The AdWords list pages depending on how much people are willing to pay. The SERPS list pages depending on "relevancy" determined by the algo unrelated to whether they are commercial or info pages.
let me take a shot at the abbreviations
SERP - Search engine result pages
PR - PageRank by Google. This is a number that can be seen by installing google toolbar (I believe availble only for IE)
PR0 - is a page with the bottom most rank "zero" awarded by Google. It means that page is not likely ever show up in Google SERPs
To my mind they are independent databases both driven by relevancy. How they do it is different however.
In the main SERPS, relevancy is assessed by a fairly complicated algo which ranks/rates over 2 billion pages.
However in Adwords Select which has a much smaller database, you can choose your own keywords to appear under, and the minimum click-though rate is the mechanism to ensure relevancy. No pop up rules, and increasing positioning by paying more are further mechanisms to ensure the quality or relevance of pages. After all, why pay increasing clickthrough costs, if the page is of poor quality.
One of my sites went live over the last few weeks and went straight into Google, Yahoo and Altavista. I've never known a site get listed so quickly, especially by Google. The Yahoo listing was amazing - a free submission and accepted within a week!
It could just be that I have designed a gorgeous website and that the search engines are very discerning (HA HA), but I've been theorizing that more likely reasons might include:
1. I have had a link from one of my other sites pointing to the new site's web address for nearly a month, so the spiders have found it. Note that I deliberately didn't do a manual submission to Google.
2. I've been running a Google Adwords Select campaign for the new site.
My suspicion is that the Adwords campaign caused the site to go into Google's main listing more quickly, and I say this because I don't think the site has been known to Googlebot for long enough to go through the usual cycle.
Cheers, Matt
Now that's not right! I think there still needs to be a little more work done on the algo ... or perhaps if you buy an adwords campaign, there's a little payback in PR?
What about it GoogleGuy?
I can't tell if that was in jest, Liane?
I don't think that people would be happy if Google messed with the proper search results based on advertising spend.
Maybe imposing a PR0 is Google's way of getting you to convert to Adwords Select ;)
If this was true than imagine what you could do to your competitors...
I donīt belive it!
