Does Google Adwords spend affect SEO?

[eljacko]

I ran a campaign where Adwords spend was lowered by half and then later SEO was hit by Google devaluing links. Coincidence? In fear not.

I know there is never evidence to show this but how many have experienced similar events?

I have in my lifetime seen many variations of this happening but would like to share this one as it was a few days apart.

[tedster]

In SEO we really need to see causation, and this report is talking about "correlation". It is so important for effective, actionable SEO intelligetnce to keep those two straight.

I have worked with some very big Adwords players, some lower level and some on again and off again. I never saw anything like causation. Over the years, I've know some big agency players who managed 8 figures worth of Adwords spend - and these folks really wanted to find any evidence they good of causation. Not one of these would-be watch dogs ever found anything near to statistical evidence of causation.

So even if we see a number of reports here - reports of similar correlation - it doesn't mean much to me. In addition, the number of REVERSE correlations that are in the history here are about the same. That's real evidence that this is only correlation and not causation.

When we look for SEO information, let's stick with something solid that creates actionable items, not wheel spinning. (:

Sorry to make it rains so hard, eljacko. This has long been one of my pet peeves.

[diberry]

eljacko, some people report similar happenings, but roughly equal numbers report just the opposite - spent more on Adwords, saw organic rankings go down. It's definitely not that simple.

First of all, I agree with Tedster - this would not be a huge coincidence. I mean, if you spend on Adwords regularly, and the algo updates fairly often, sooner or later you're going to change your spending habits and the algo will change at about the same time, and you'll get the "correlation" Tedster's talking about. But the one won't be because of the other.

I do have a more complicated theory on this - and keep in mind it's just conjecture, I have no idea if any of this is true, it's just the only thing I can come up besides "coincidence". I think Google can track whether after visiting your site, I bounced back to Google and visit another site, which suggests your site didn't have what I wanted on that query (and your site should rank lower). If they also do this with Adwords queries, then:

--If you pay for a keyphrase that's not a good match for your landing page and people bounce back to find something better, you could be sending signals to Google that people don't like you for that query.

--On the other hand, if you pay for a keyphrase that's a good match, you'd be sending Google signals that people like you for that query.

If this is how it works, then it could be that you just stopped generating the number of happy user signals you had been sending.

I actually doubt, however, that Google would use signals from Adwords clicks to determine organic rankings. It could be perceived as a conflict of interest if they're ever investigated for unfair trade practices. But they might might use data collected from Adwords to tweak the algo.

In any case, I'd say your real problem is either an algo update or a penalty to your site.

If you can afford to raise your spending back up to previous levels for a while, however, you could at least see whether or not that solves the problem. That would be an interesting test. I don't know of any other way to do it.

[FranticFish]

I've seen just the opposite behaviour to that described in the OP a number of times.

I frequently use AdWords to test keywords and site performance whilst researching a niche and trying to verify keyword research.

Sometimes the client wants to keep AdWords going, usually they don't. I have NEVER seen turning off AdWords affect a client's organic ranking, and it's most often turned off once they begin to rank and decide that SEO is now in a position to offer a better ROI than PPC.