More Adwords £ = Less Natural Search

[diytravel]

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First Allegra dumped our site drastically. Now Bourbon has finished it off! The only click throughs that we get from Google now are from Adwords.

Here is a diagnosis of the last 6 months:
January 2005 - Site doing great. Page 1 for lots of terms.
February 2005 - Start slipping down the results.
March 2005 - Continue sliding. Start spending on Adwords.
April 2005 - Worse still. Increase Adwords spend.
May 2005 - Natural search is terrible - yet more money into Adwords.
June 2005 - Natural search is almost non-existent. Ask Jeeves now providing more traffic. More money into Adwords.
6th July 2005 - Hold on. This is taking the piss. Turn off all Adwords and switch to Overture.

So my theory is that the more you spend on Adwords, the less you get from natural search. An easy rule for Google to implement.

Anyone else seen the same thing happen?

Ben

[everydayholiday]

I think it s a coincidence, because some merchants experience the opposite. More adwords, higher in natural search. Of course Google denies this, and says that's also a coincidence.

stef

[Leeky]

The exact same thing happened to me, the more i spent on adwords the less natural searches i got!

I also noticed that convertion rates seem to be much higher per visitor on natural searches than per visitor via adwords.

I then stopped nearly all of my adwords, now my natural searches are slowly coming back.

Lee

[angelabx]

Interestingly, we lauched two sites about two months ago. One we started immediately advertising using Adwords and the other we didn't.

The one we didn't has been fully crawled by Googlebot and listed but the one on adwords has been ignored by Googlebot!

[angelabx]

Well I've been testing this theory for the last few months and definately feel something is not right.

The new sites we launched a few months ago that are not being promoted on adwords are now doing well in natural serps. BUT the ones we immediately started promoting on adwords are still nowhere in the natural serps.

More shockingly .....

Three months ago we started promoting on adwords two of our sites that have been ranking VERY high for 4 years in natural serps. This week they have virtually vanished from the natural serps!

I now support the theory that if you display your URL on adwords it gets penalised several months down the line in the natural serps. (Maybe when a Google bod gets around to pushing the penalty button?)

Is this a clever tactic to draw more and more spend out of you? I think so.

I'm now not sure whether to cease all our adwords activity on high ranking domains? I think Google have us over a barrel on this one.

I think in future our policy will be:

Separate projects and urls for natural serps to those used for PPC adwords.

I'm quite shocked by what's happened.

Could be coincidence of course