Forum Moderators: martinibuster
1. Lest I be adding to an urban myth,I believe we have established that the publisher gets no payment for clicks made under related searches.
2. On hotel sites I am finding "Best Western inns" and "Howard Johnson " coming up on a site delivering indformation on particular cities in, say, Colorado.
These "related searches" take one to the serps page on Google, where, lo and behold, the first site up is "Best Western Inns"
I would find it difficult to accept that Google is just happening to be putting Best Western on related searches over everyone else. It must be directly or indirectly paid advertising....
...if it is paid advertising then it would seem somewhat shifty of Google not to be paying for the clicks
3. If I think it underhand, then advertisers must be equally mad, the "Best Western Inns" related "free advert" appears directly under some other hotels AdWords advert for that city. If I were that advertiser, then I would not be happy either.
Does not look good from anyones point of view (except Googles)
it might also be worth checking out if any "related searches" go to a SERP without advertisements, have you seen one?
To me that could make the difference between related searches being a quality service or simply an extra revenue stream for them.
In my opinion, no one is paying for the related searches, but maybe someone more in the know can elaborate on that.
My point is that there are a number of "related searches" that appear to be paid for adverising - as in the case of Best Western or Howard Johnson Hotels.
There is no reason to assume that for a major city in the USA that an out of the blue link to Best Western is helpful to the searcher.
Why pick Best Western in a page with maybe links to 50 other hotels? One has to assume that either that group have paid to be there, or have sufficient "clout" with Google from their normal advertising, that this "service" is being offered by Google reps for their major accounts as a sort of bonus.
