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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Whether or not you want to admit if Google PageRank is useful, many webmasters base their decisions on your sites PageRank for link trades, advertising, and various other business decisions. Many “SEO experts” advise webmasters not to spend too much time on PageRank, but I do believe PageRank is an important aspect of internet marketing. If PageRank is so useless as many of these “SEO experts” claim why do sites that I own with a higher PageRank continually bring in more income through various means than those that have zero or low PageRank? I’m not saying that PageRank is the answer to being successful, but it does have its place when it comes to internet marketing.

As an affiliate marketer I’ve been tracking Google PageRank and backlink updates for the last couple of years and have decided to dedicate a section on this site for providing historical information on Google updates. I hope readers of the blog will find this information as useful as myself. Go to The Google Update History >>>

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Just days after Microsoft made an offer to buy out search portal Yahoo, Yahoo responded back rejecting the $44 billion dollar offer saying it was not in the best interest of its shareholders.  Yahoo’s board felt that Microsoft’s offer substantially undervalues Yahoo.

Today, Microsoft released a statement in response to Yahoo’s rejection which can bee seen on the Microsoft site.

What’s my stance on the merger?  I feel that if both companies can start to compete with Google through the merger then it is a good thing, but on the other hand receiving all your traffic from two search engines rather than three isn’t better.  The perfect scenario would be if Yahoo and Microsoft didn’t merge, and all three search engines pushed internet traffic equally.  It would make me sleep easier at night knowing that if my rankings crashed in one of the search engines the other two would still be sending me traffic.  As it stands today, Google is the be-all and end-all of search engine traffic.

If you haven’t been keeping up with the latest events in the merger I suggest you do because I feel the outcome is important for the affiliate and SEO industry.  I’ll be covering the events of the Microsoft/Yahoo merger as things progress.

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