Building Trust in Ad Systems

Google's ad network is large enough that they can afford to kill off portions of their short term income to improve long term network viability. The still sell ads on garbage sites because some advertisers find value there (and others have small accounts or have not researched their spend). Andrew Goodman recently had a great post about how Google is filtering out the profitability of advertising noisy spammy AdWords ads to minimize the number of them appearing on Google. Andrew wrote:

Post pages that don't give adequate access to the crawler - or adequate keyword cues - and you risk facing the wrath of the quality scoring algorithm. It's less of a worry as much if you have an established account - it's new accounts that face the toughest tests with the predictive aspect of the algorithm, intended to weed out specific types of violators, experimenters, and ham-fisted copywriters.

In essence Google is going to require you to build trust and market data over time to gain the ability to even be trusted enough to gain anything near maximal ad distribution (even if you are willing to overpay for exposure).

Jumping from Paid Search to Organic Search

Some people believe that old sites only rank well because of the links they have acquired over time, but I think even just existing for a certain amount of time without being manually or algorithmically tripped up for some spam infraction allows search engines to place more trust on your site.

Plus requiring sites to be a bit older to rank well requires an additional expense and / or level of knowledge that many people lack.

You can bet that if they are taking a lets wait and see approach on paid ads they are also doing the same on organic search results.