Over the last year or two I’ve been tracking the top Google search engine results pages (SERPs) for a number of industries, and I have to admit there has been a disturbing trend that I’ve been noticing in Google’s SERPs.   It seems Google is favoring the following type of websites more and more: government and state sites, community driven sites, free sites, it’s own sites (like Youtube), and sites with an already well-known branding.

Of course I have no evidence, just like any other person who doesn’t work for Google, that Google is manually manipulating its SERPs to favor these sites, but from experience it definitely looks like this is what is occuring.  On the other hand, you can also argue that the type of sites listed above should be listed at the top because by nature they attract natural links all on their own, therefore ranking highest in the SERPs.  I’ll leave it up to you to decide which argument you believe while I make an argument for the former statement in this post.

If you look at the type of sites I listed above you’ll see all these sites have one thing in common - there is no interest for these sites to ever purchase Google AdWords advertising.  When have you ever seen a government or state site do AdWords advertising, or a free site like Wikipedia, or Myspace, or a newspaper?  Maybe in rare cases it does happen, but the majority of the time these sites never advertise through AdWords.  Well, these are the type of sites that are populating Google’s first and now second page SERPs more and more, while also knocking down regular webmaster sites in the SERPs.

Again the next statement is all speculation and I have no solid proof, but the reason I think Google is doing this is the search engine is trying to make it harder for regular webmasters to get traffic organically through the SERPs.  Advanced SEOs and webmasters already know a large percentage of search engine traffic goes to listings in the first page of the SERPs, and for high traffic terms possibly even the second page of the SERPs.  If Google populates these pages with the sites listed above then the only way “Joe Schmoe” webmaster can get some of that valuable search engine traffic is to bid for keywords through Google AdWords.  The result of this, of course, is inflated CPC keywords since there are more advertisers competing for keywords, and more profit for Google.

In addition, a secondary effect this causes is the stifling of the buying and selling of text links, which Google has been diligently trying and unable to stop to this day.  Buying and selling of text links has grown into a huge business that cuts into Google AdWords profits because instead of funneling their money into AdWords, many webmasters choose to buy text links to rank in organic SERPs.  Google knows this and sees the text link market as a competitor and enemy to its business model; which is why for the last few years, and more aggressively within the last year, Google has been going after sites that either buy or sell text links.  Populating the first and second page SERPs with the sites mentioned in the first paragraph, and making it nearly impossible for regular webmasters to outrank them for organic search engine traffic will stifle the text link market because if webmasters can’t turn a profit through organic SE traffic by ranking in the top spots they won’t buy text links anymore.  Any smart webmaster wouldn’t pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for text links to get mediocre rankings which receive barely any traffic through the search engines.  All that money which was going into text links for SEO will certainly be used for AdWords advertising after all things are said and done, and Google will be smiling its way to bigger profits.

So you can see that Google benefits in every single way by favoring the aforementioned sites in its SERPs;  benefiting specifically by forcing regular webmasters to use Google AdWords if they want any type of traffic from Google’s search engine. It’s Google’s monopolistic way of forcing webmasters to use AdWords, and increase its profit if you ask me.

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