Paid Search Links Affect Organic Google Ranking
By Anna Johnson on June 17th, 2009In a stunning revelation, Search Engine Watch’s Mark Jackson indicates that paid search advertising CAN affect organic search rankings.
Reviewing a client’s backlinks, Mark Jackson’s team discovered instances of backlink anchor text that they were not optimizing for i.e. seeking links with these keywords. Further investigation revealed that the links were from paid search ads on both Yahoo Search Marketing and Google AdWords.
If you haven’t fallen out of your chair yet, let me just point out a couple of things. Firstly, to date, Google has always blocked its own paid links from being counted in the backlinks to a given website for organic search engine ranking purposes. Secondly, it has actively disallowed the inclusion of paid links from other sites in its count of backlinks to a given website.
In terms of disallowing ads displayed on Google’s Adsense network or Yahoo’s network, as the case may be, Google and Yahoo have traditionally used a redirect procedure for preventing robots from following (and counting) links.
Basically, when someone clicks on, say, a Google Adsense ad, they are first redirected to a Google domain which has a robots disallow command in the robots.txt file, before being sent to the destination page. The robots disallow command tells the search engines not to follow the link.
So, if Mark Jackson is right, how is it possible that paid links, from Google Adwords no less, are being counted in the backlinks to a given website?
Mark Jackson theorizes that it’s due to Google crawling and counting JavaScript links on websites. Since most parked domains use javascript links and other scripts to take and display ads from Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing these are now being included. As a result, Google is inadvertently counting paid links as backlinks to a given website.
As Mark Jackson points out, we probably can’t expect this phenomenon to last. Google is likely rectifying the glitch, if it hasn’t rectified it already.
Even so, this discovery (if true) – combined with Google’s new approach to the ‘no follow’ tag – just goes to show that Google isn’t perfect, predictable or likely to keep things as they are forever… which just goes to underscore the ever-changing nature of the search engine optimization.
June 17th, 2009 at 2:36 am
That’s interesting points.
We do have paid search link cross Yahoo and Google content network. We have not had any impact on the organic search engine traffic. However, we do see our own paid link with our main keywords on the first result page instead of the indexed page.
I guess that is what the impact is right?
July 10th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
Anna,
Paid Search Campaigns do effectively advance a websites pagerank probably even more so than SEO work, however I don’t understand your reasoning behind Mark Jackson’s theory.