Is Google rewarding AdWords ads more than content/backlinks?

I think I have evidence that supports this idea...

[Sean_Sloan]

I the course of building a site for an industrial company that makes custom widgets I ran across an amazing page that is like textbook old school SEO: a HUGE amount of text, very few pictures (all pertinent), good amount of outbound links, very clean, simple design. As a result it ranks #1 in Google for this desirable keyword phrase, no surprise there.

Over time I have used this as an example to customers and other web people as "textbook" SEO, saying "this is how its done, end of story".

Last week when I typed in that keyword phrase to check in on it its position had been usurped by a dirt simple page that exhibited NONE of the "textbook" SEO attributes at all, it only had Google ads. This made me not only suspicious but kind of upset.

Just this week I went back to see if backlinks could possibly be the cause. I used a free tool that said that the original "textbook" site has 157 backlinks while the Google AdWords site has only 22 backlinks. This would seem to only reinforce my theory.

Are Google's SERP's now rewarding AdWords more than good, honest content and backlinks? Doesn't this seems patently unfair and the confirmation of many peoples fears? Or am I just naive and inexperienced?

*Just now checked again and the "textbook" page is back in #1 but the AdWords page is still in #2 position, seemingly undeserved.

I'd be curious to hear what people think about this episode.

[reseller]

Sean_Sloan

Last week when I typed in that keyword phrase to check in on it its position had been usurped by a dirt simple page that exhibited NONE of the "textbook" SEO attributes at all, it only had Google ads.

Are you talking about a blank page with only AdSense spots on?

No title, no meta tags and no body text at all?

[Sean_Sloan]

No, this is a standard web page, it just contains 5 AdWords and a paltry amount of content, nothing, seemingly, to warrant its position, especially in comparison to the heroic effort made in the 1st example.

[Sean_Sloan]

One more significant detail: the content of the page does NOT appear in the code of the page at all, it seems to be being loaded via Javascript and appears only in the page presented to the browser.

[King_Fisher]

Always follow the money.

[CainIV]

To effectively rank, the page only needs either links in anchor text inbound, text on the page, or in the meta description from the research I have seen.

The text link anchor is most important, while meta d referencing can help, but usually only in longer tail searches that are less competitive.

My sense is it is either a glitch or that webpage has what Google deems to be powerful enough links to it to compete with the #1.

[tedster]

Whatever is causing that page to rank well, I strongly doubt that it is the presence of Adsense. This is a commonly voiced suspicion, I know. But if Google ever did this, it would be suicide for their business, and they know it. The kind of result you describe, if it happens too often, would drive away Google's user base and then there's no one there to click on search ads -- and search ads mean a lot more for Google than Adsense income.

There are off-page factors that can boost page's a ranking that are very hard to research. One of these is the effect of 301 redirects to the URL. A 301 can pass on both PR and backlink anchor text influence. And how do you go about finding a 301 to a URL? There's no comprehensive way that I know of -- just some guessing techniques. The PR effect of a 301, when you finally see it on the toolbar 3 or 4 months later, may still be extremely hard to pin down even then.

Also, there are lots of people who are watching big piles of Google data -- including Google's partners. There would be quite an uproar coming from many directions if the organic SERPs began to show this kind of distortion. The best way for Google to protect and boost their ad income is to keep their natural search user base coming back.

[edited by: tedster at 8:12 pm (utc) on July 9, 2007]

[Sean_Sloan]

Thanks to everyone who took the time to jump in on this question, I appreciate it. For now its back to basics.

[europeforvisitors]

Whatever is causing that page to rank well, I strongly doubt that it is the presence of Adsense. This is a commonly voiced suspicion, I know. But if Google ever did this, it would be suicide for their business, and they know it.

Also, if Google were favoring pages with AdSense ads, we wouldn't hear complaints about Wikipedia ranking high for so many keyphrases.