Oct 22 update may be to increase ads clicks...

[seosutra]

I think the oct 22 update was intentional on google's part... because it would do 2 things:

1 - it will draw more clicks on the ads since the results are poor.

2 - it will also induce the store owners to start with ad campaigns then only relying on the SERPs.

Like my company, as soon as they knew that serps got hit.. we started with an AD Campaign.. so did we fall prey?

dont be evil google.

[tedster]

Many webmasters over the years have thought about this when their rankings went down, or they feel the overall SERPs got lower in quality. I've never bought into that train of thought - here's why.

Google most definitely intends to be here for the long term. Intentionally giving poor results would be a short term action to get an incremental boost in income that would hurt them in the long term - and hurt them very very much. It would demolish the very foundational strengths that built their business.

[edited by: tedster at 6:21 pm (utc) on Dec 22, 2010]

[goodroi]

Maybe Google was trying to decrease ad clicks with the Oct 22 update. You see some sites that had poor organic rankings and spending alot in adwords got a ranking boost and thus stopped using Google adwords.

The theory of google organic updates being linked to ad clicks has a big problem. When someone loses rankings, another site gains it, which leads to no change.

IMHO it is much more profitable to research what changed in Google's algo than to discuss conspiracy theories. If you know what changed then you can make changes to boost your website's ranking. The secret is to constantly research and test so you minimize the chance of being caught off-guard.