Google Paid Inclusion Programs: Buy a Top Ranking Today

Hey Aaron. I'm surprised that more folks haven't chimed in on this post. I think that you highlight some very obviously shady business tactics that Google engages in (though I'm not quite sure that many of them qualify as unethical in any sense). Google, like most mega-corporations, serves many masters and engages in a lot of behavior that is far from altruistic.

However, when it comes to their approach to paid inclusion, I think that your hypothesis might not hold up to rigorous scientific inquiry. A couple of things worth noting are:
1) for many e-commerce/retail product queries the "little guy" (non-enterprise) is typically selling the same exact product the big guys are selling. In fact, the big guys like Amazon.com (and Walmart, who few realize is adopting Amazon.com's marketplace model) often end up selling the little guy's stuff. Commoditization is a big part of retail (e.g. a bunch of players, big and small, selling the same thing) and for those types of queries, creating a tightly controlled, paid-inclusion experience actually improves search results because it removes some of the fly-by-nights that are selling the same stuff but with vastly poorer customer service or quality control processes.

2) Like you, I don't have access to all of the data (which is a crucial prerequisite when attempting to falsify a hypothesis) but what I can tell you is that I do have the data on nearly a half-dozen very small e-commerce companies that all get massive amounts of natural search traffic for highly lucrative terms across a wide variety of verticals. In fact, the scales are so tipped in their favor that I can't even convince them (as a friend and confidant) to invest in product listing ads (PLAs) or even paid search in some cases!

Your article, as usual, is making me think a lot, and for that I am grateful. However, one thing that comes to mind is if you've ever thought that perhaps your viewpoint on these matters is less than objective, and if so, if you've ever considered looking into data points that would falsify your current hypothesis.

3) I know of a tiny cabinet maker that sells his cabinets online in addition to locally. He gets massive swaths of natural search traffic despite the fact that his results are almost always below the fold due to not only paid ads but also local search results since Google considers "cabinet" related searches local by default in most cases.

So for example, have you ever considered gathering screen shots of e-commerce search results that have plenty of natural results above the folder? Or perhaps gathering data on small players to find out if they do or don't capture their fair share of natural search for highly lucrative e-commerce terms?

I'm glad that you're committed to shedding light on the shadier business practices of Google, other conglomerates, and even governments. But as you likely know, I sometimes wonder if you fail to apply scientific rigor or even basic skepticism to your hypotheses.

After all, there's no such thing as absolute certainty.

paid-inclusion experience actually improves search results because it removes some of the fly-by-nights that are selling the same stuff but with vastly poorer customer service or quality control processes.

Generally sure, but your protection from a scammer selling into a larger marketplace isn't any greater than buying directly from a scammer. If you use a credit card you can reverse the charge either way.

What's missing is *diversity* ... I mean yes some stuff does get ported over to eBay and Amazon.com & such, but if you want old collectibles there are sites that have them that can't be found already. And when it goes pay to play only they certainly won't be found. Likewise with those selling rather unique items. I search for "gold rings" and Google shows me some terrible $22 ring from Nordstrom. That might be great for the average user, but it is an awful experience for me. I bet many Google engineers would get put in a choke hold by their wives if they bought them such a ring. :D

Even worse if the vendors in AdWords are also the top organic results AND in paid inclusion. You get the same trash served to you 3 different ways.

Your article, as usual, is making me think a lot, and for that I am grateful. However, one thing that comes to mind is if you've ever thought that perhaps your viewpoint on these matters is less than objective, and if so, if you've ever considered looking into data points that would falsify your current hypothesis.

The only aggregate data that is really needed is the growth rate of paid clicks & screenshots of the search results. Everything else is a side current following the above general trend.

Can someone say my analysis is flawed or not objective? Certainly that can be claimed, but there is no way to honestly claim that it is more self-interested & less objective than what Google has done over the past year. I mean even their own internal docs in the Rosetta Stone case showed they knew AdWords created consumer confusion & I *did* survey users about a half-dozen different ways about paid search ads & users were generally pretty clueless. Further, even Google's early research stated that they felt ad-based search business models were bad.

I do have the data on nearly a half-dozen very small e-commerce companies that all get massive amounts of natural search traffic for highly lucrative terms across a wide variety of verticals. In fact, the scales are so tipped in their favor that I can't even convince them (as a friend and confidant) to invest in product listing ads (PLAs) or even paid search in some cases!

And there are thousands of folks with the other side of that story. The big issue is it seems abstract or like nonsense until it is oneself in the guillotine. And by the time it happens it is likely already too late.

So for example, have you ever considered gathering screen shots of e-commerce search results that have plenty of natural results above the folder? Or perhaps gathering data on small players to find out if they do or don't capture their fair share of natural search for highly lucrative e-commerce terms?

Certainly there are coverage gaps in any vertical. But the trend is that they get filled over time. I follow the leading edge of trends, because that is where things are headed. I don't have much concern for the things that have not yet changed, because over time more and more of those change. Google does things with levels of confidence, so bigger & deeper markets (in terms of ecommerce and local) will be impacted first. But it doesn't mean that I should focus on smaller towns as a contrary opportunity, because many of those are so tiny that they are not opportunities AND over time as the models are refined many of them will be shifted over too.

If I want to find out the general direct of hotel search results I search for stuff like "New York Hotel" rather than "Forrest, IL Motel." Also note in that new york hotel search result I just linked to that they also added entity graph for that word, so they are now even graphing some generic keywords. If you click into that you stay on the search page & if you click on those various options that brings you to more search results & so on. It is becoming harder to leave Google.com without clicking an ad. And that is well reflected in their quarterly numbers, quarter after quarter.

Another way of stating the above is that when revenue is a driver of decisions the biggest and deepest markets get fed first. If Google has trouble getting *anybody* to buy the keyword "credit cards" in the Philippines & there are only 2 hotels in a town of 1,000 people (where a hotel stay costs $23 a night) Google can't skim as much off that market as it can from getting a cut of 90,000 people staying in New York City for a couple hundred Dollars a night each.

You make some valid points, Aaron. I have some additional thoughts on the matter (actually a whole bunch of them) because this is one of my favorite topics (paid vs. natural inclusion) but I'll leave you with this:

Next time you want to find a really unique gold ring for your wife skip Google and Amazon and hit up Pinterest. But do it quick because the big retailers are flooding that new revenue stream too (it's amazing to see how much revenue that network can generate for retailers).

That or, like you and most other people on the upper edge of the bell curve, do the extra legwork to find those niche folks that have the really good unique stuff. Google and Amazon should only be a starting point. The internet is a big place.

That's how I found some sweet Lightnin' Hopkins cover art for my office walls:
http://www.wolfgangsvault.com/lightnin-hopkins/photography/fine-art-prin...

Cheers!

Fact of the matter is that we, SEO's are losing a battle that is ever changing. We have monetized our services ongoign for some time as we have evolved as Google has however, there is a very distinct motive that you ahve pointed out time and time again: revenue. It's really not about the user experience anymore. I believe that their attempts to benefit the user experience are masked with PR and political "run-around" answers. The best thing we, or any business owner can do is to subscribe to the changes and obide by them, or soak a shit-load of money into AdWords. I am beginging to feel, which is what they want me to do is to focus more on CPA of an AdWrords program. If I am spending enough then at leat I'll have some recourse with a rep, or conversation of someone following internal Q & A procedures to ease my thoughts of getting fucked.

I fail to see how the new layout is any better than Adsense pages. All the real content is below the fold in that case. What is happening to Google? I'm glad you bring a hard dose of reality. It seems too many SEO's are too rosy in the cheeks about these updates. I own small businesses and these updates are hideous and I can't imagine what it must be like for people with far less SEO experience than me.

The spammy network of churned content is FindTheBest, for those who didn't recognize them. I find it very frustrating that Google called them --the next big thing in search-- and indexes just about everything they do. I initially believed FTB was a skunk farm or a front for how Google wants to spam the web going forward, keeping everyone on Google peoperties that re-represent everyone's scraped content. I still do.

If Google did what FTB is doing, they'd get heat. But if "someone else" does it (like a former Googler), Google can highlight it as awesome, rank it for everything, learn from it, and never take responsibility (until they buy it). Cowards. And the FTB people can play around with no fear of actually having to survive in the search marketplace.

To all who say SEO's are dying or going out of business or whatever, check yourselves.

Back in 1995 "SEO" was completely different than it was 2 years later. An actual Search Engine had been invented... and Google copied it and modern search took off. Prior to that "search" was merely what we call directory indexing today. The SEO people survived.

Back in 2003 search changed again... and the SEO people survived. In 2007, 2008, and virtually all of 2011, search was redefined. Now we see Google closing up...which will change search engine. I think good SEO people will survive.

"This sort of contempt exists at essentially all large companies."

I believe that in this respect you, uncharacteristically, are taking the heat off Google.

In my experience, most large companies (I'm a small entrepreneur, never having worked at any of those) do aim to provide a decent customer service characterized by

- dedicated teams properly staffed
- 0-24 availability
- the possibility of personal interactions
- procedures put in place that ensure your specific problem will be dealt with somewhere down the line

Google is egregiously lousy in terms of customer service, and from the Wired article you linked, now I understand why. I especially love the "It worked, and thereafter Griffin cited it as evidence of Page’s instinctive brilliance" part, coming from the gushing employee.

Yeah, this genius plan to get rid of customer service chores really works.

It only depends whether you judge it by the experience of those partners and customers who have to struggle with the crap Google provides as "help", or rather by the company's financial results, further enhanced thanks to yet another responsibility Google could "brilliantly solve" not to care about.

For this is a core element of the company's modus operandi: finding brilliant ways to ensure a progressively decreasing burden of responsibility. A lot of what you rail against in this blog can be explained as a symptom of a company striving for ultimate non-responsibility.

More and more it seems, Google's corporate culture is very much a mirror image of the (not so) slightly psychopathic personality of its founders. If you look beyond the over-emphasized public image of playfulness and do-goodness, one would be hard-pressed to find any other company so fundamentally un-human below the surface as Google. Their only gods are scalability and power.

Great comment Headway. Anyone who's ever had a technical problem with Google knows how bad they are at customer service. From Google Products to Webmasters, the best you get are canned responses that are often irrelevant to the technical query.

Next time you want to find a really unique gold ring for your wife skip Google and Amazon and hit up Pinterest

hugoguzman, what does that tell you about Google then? Google are meant to be THE portal to the internet - where you can unearth the most obscure product or opinion or service. That's their USP - to give you relevant results from their uniquely deep index of the web. If Google just want to be a decent commodity-search tool, then why wouldn't anyone just disintermediate Google altogether and browse eBay or Amazon for commodity products? If Google do court the bigger brands simply by pricing out smaller companies, they may find themselves becoming ever more irrelevant to many searchers who are like Aaron and want to find non-commodity products. And what of services? By their very nature, services are largely "non-commodity" - they're dependent on each individual company and their skillsets. If big service companies can out-spend smaller ones, is that a "win" for the Google searcher looking for a quality service regardless of the size of the service provider? No.

Furthermore, if Google do start streamlining their results to paid inclusion / knocking organic listings further down, and we end up constantly getting the same brands appearing, it's not hard for a competitor to produce the same results. If the top 10,000 brands or whatever become 90% of your results, then the cost to index (and keep fresh) 90% of your SERPs is a lot easier to do (for competitors). Google lose their hard-to-copy USP (deep index).

I can't help but think Google are boxing themselves into a corner here, and they perhaps even know it - but they just can't stop because they only have one main revenue stream - ads.

Probably what it speaks to the most is that Google is far from the overwhelming monopoly most people think it is.

Well my point was that Google are losing their USP of being the only place to dig out the more the obscure products and vendors online. That has nothing to do with whether Google are a monopoly or not. Though if they do continue to narrow down their results (due to pricing out smaller businesses), then they may just become an also-ran for product discovery in the future.

It's by far the second option for e-commerce discovery, trailing far behind Amazon.

That's an interesting claim - do you have any data to show Google are far behind Amazon when it comes to volume of e-commerce searches?

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-21/google-2-4-rate-shows-how-60-bi...

It's getting like they don't care about search anymore, just money. As Terry Kyle put it "There's no way that Google's SERPs would pass their own Google Human Review guidelines on some/many search terms now."

Something to the effect of:

3rd Page Google- Support Small Business

Right off the bat you spoke about "Notice Google tells us "paid relationships improve quality" and then penalizes for paid links?" The problem I see is that google is getting so far removed from giving their customers (Those who use the search engine) what they really want "Truly relevant search results" and instead are now so concentrated on ad revenue that the combination of giving advertisers what they want and the customer true relevant search results has now become hazed at best. Or perhaps I am just too cynical to the reality?

Hey Guys (and Gals) I am new to posting on here, but have been a long time reader.

I have noticed a shift in how the Google shopping results are showing up. It seems like about 80-90 percent of my searches put the Google shopping results in upper right hand corner of the screen. It seems like this is actually increasing the CTR for our organic results. In the past it used to place the old Google shopping in line with the organic results 100 percent of the time. Is anyone else noticing this?

CTR for organic results when the shopping results that were inline have now been replaced with ads showing in the right rail? If you were #2 in the past for commercial terms, google would place the shopping results inline above you. This would include a picture and 3 links most times. Being #2 was more like being #5. Our rankings haven't really improved since this testing has been going on, but a lot of our keywords that were #2-5 are getting a lot more clicks. I just can't figure out why other than the CTR increasing because of the lack of shopping results. Nothing else has really changed. Maybe I'm over thinking this.