Adwords and effects on organic results

Wardy · 19-04-06

I can remember reading a couple of things quite a while ago now with regards to google adwords to promote a site and how it ranks in the organic listings.
I didn't read into it all properly and more through my own fault I've just been cautious of doing any adwords on sites I want to rank well organicly.

I did speak to a couple of people at the AF g2g last month who said it's rubbish and has no effect and to be honest I've always thought that is the case but it's just the little niggle in the back of my mind that has stopped me from PPCing some of my sites.

Does anyone else have any other views/thoughts on it or am I just being a muppet

Cheers
Wardy

drivetowin · 19-04-06

I have heard the rumours on this - I can see how it could work but can't confirm if it does except to say that lots of my sites rank very well in natural search and I do no ppc activity at all - now whether that has an impact or not I can't say and I'm not about to do some ppc just to find out.

Brendon · 19-04-06

AdWords has NO direct effect on your natural ranking. It is possible for there to be an indirect effect, if Google are collecting and using toolbar data on the same scale as Yahoo, but it will be minimal either way

Ste · 19-04-06

Hmm, the jury has been out on this for quite a while and there is a good argument both ways. Personally I don’t do PPC, but I would have thought in business terms (As Google are business/money orientated) it would be more profitable for Google to keep you at a lower listing if you do use Adwords so that you keep on paying for the traffic.

mikey_freedom · 19-04-06

Although my Adwords activity has definitely been small scale in terms of spend over the past three years it's been pretty specific and I really don't think this is a real issue (I assume you are meaning concerns that running Adwords will damage organic results as it would be in Google's best interests to keep your presence a paid for one)

I find sites can rank very well for one specific keyword in the results but a bit of PPC is necessary for any presence in more general terms (this though is because of the site's newness, lack of general content and relatively low reach, few back links and greater number of search results you are competing against). The PPC activity has no negative effect on organic results for either the general or specific keyword to be honest.

I did worry for a while when I had one site that had been sitting on Yahoo and MSN frontpage, often in #1, for about six months when it languished at #150 or below on Google for the same keyword, and it was a site that had been promoted from it's first day via Adwords. As I padded the site out (and gave it a bit more frequent attention for updating) it's risen to the frontpage with the recent Google results. This happened after I'd stopped PPC activity on it for a while, but I think the trend was most certainly there already.

I wouldn't be overly bothered about these kind of rumouors of a negative effect on organic results. They seem to have been floating around since the start of Adwords. I've always been more worried about the poor quality of some of the ads on the content network. 30 cents for a blind monkey in Timbuktu clicking an ad on some scraper site is not going to be much use at all. If you do anything with Adwords my choices would still be search results but I have used and found site targeted CPM ads can be useful too.

holmes · 19-04-06

I personally don't subscribe to the thoughts that running PPC can ruin your organic results either. I had a No.1 google spot for about 3 years, this suddenly dropped to page 2 in one of googles shake ups, I started running Adwords as a results and after 6 months i was back at No.1 with the PPC still running, so I stopped it. It's just another Google myth concotted by people who don't rank in google!