Organic Rankings Manually Tweaked for AdWords?

[seocolin]

I have a retail website that has ranked in the top 10 of google.co.uk for a very competitive search term for many years.

I received a gift voucher for £80 in the post a week ago to try Google Adwords. Well, how could I refuse, I quickly created an AdWords campaign and it started running. Within two days my site had dropped to positions 10 - 15 for my all important top term. Then the free campaign ended and I didn't enter my payment details to continue with the campaign. Today my site has disappeared from the top 50 for that all important top term.

Perhaps a coincidence but it does seem a rather timely and strange occurrence!

Has anyone else experienced similar I wonder?

[Pjman]

Holy crap! I thought that was my conspiracy theory from a few years back. I had the same thing happen to me about 18 months ago. The rankings came back to normal after about 6 months.

But it was like they gave me a penalty to pay for their ads. WTF Google? They are starting to look more evil each day.

[tedster]

I'm 100% convinced this was a coincidence. I've worked with too many sites and too many Adwords campaigns to think otherwise.