I am convinced.

[LongView]

At this point I am thoroughly convinced that if you have a new site, and you set up an AdWords account, your free rankings drop dramatically.

Its insane how we went from a gradually increasing ranking ... page 72 ... to page 21 ... to page 7... to page 2 .... to page 1..... over a period of 2 years and then I buy an AdWords account and mysteriously .... within 3 weeks, we drop from page 1 to page 36 on all our key words?

Ive owned a successful site for over 7 years and i know exactly how to get to the top of Google. I know for a fact nothing has changed on my site nor our link popularity.

The only thing I did differently this time was sponsor some ads, and ever since we did that, our free rankings have dropped and have not recovered.

[dramstore]

It could be coincidence.

I have many clean sites, several of them dropped out 6 weeks ago, some 4 weeks ago and some dropped out yesterday, seems to be big changed going on, not good ones though.

I also had a new adwords campaign 6 weeks ago which seems to cause some sites to go, but when it happened, many people moaned in this forum too so I assume it was not related, but who knows.

Still, if anyone using the internet wants to view the unique content on my site that's no longer in the google index, there are hundreds of scraper sites out for my keywords still showing it!

[AdWordsAdvisor]

At this point I am thoroughly convinced that if you have a new site, and you set up an AdWords account, your free rankings drop dramatically.

It could be coincidence.

I'm firmly in the coincidence camp myself - although I do know that a Googler chiming in (yet again) to say "No connection at all between search results and Adwords, folks!" will not necessarily convince everyone. ;)

AWA

[fiu88]

I'm pretty convinced...but what are you gonna do?
keep paying 2 k/month....

[limitup]

If it's true it's not across the board. Or at least it doesn't work the opposite way. For one of our sites we spend 50k+ a month on AdWords. Then one day about 6 months ago we decided we wanted to work on getting higher organic listings so we did the whole link thing, etc. Within a few months we were #1 for all of our important terms.

Did you lose your DMOZ listing? I've noticed that has a HUGE affect.

[ogletree]

It is not connected. I have never seen this happen. I do both organic and adwords. I alo monitor many sites for other people and have not seen anything like that happen.

[fiu88]

Limitup..50k/month? damn..thats a nice chunk to be spending..
We're thinking of doing the link thing too...even the article thing,...any words of advice?

[bullfrog]

This happened to us also. We initially had first page listings. We then began to advertise with AdWords just across from the normal listing. Soon after our site disappeared and has never returned, its been several years now. Perhaps there is some script which prevents sites from monopolizing to much room on the first page. I do not see many advertisers who have both adwords and regular listings on the same page.