It recently occurred to me that Google may be elevating these sites in their results to increase revenue.
Has anyone been able to confirm this, or is it common knowledge?
If this is the case, doesn't it diminish google usefulness?
It does seem it would produce more clicks for Adwords advertisers, but the quality of the clicks would need to be evaluated separately.
Also, I, like everyone, would like to see my site go up in the listings, but I don't really want to advertise my competitors on it in order to do so.
Can anyone shed some light on this issue?
I've run my site for over 6 years now. 2.8 of those with adsense. I've noticed no significant difference in search ranking with/without ads. And, my site ranks in the top 5 for many 50 to 100 million-result searchs.
I don't think that google would slam the top listings with sites that run their ads, but I do think that they may have tweaked the algorithm to include more of these and some categories may have more than others.
Really, it only makes sense that they would do this.
