A member of the search community claimed in a tweet that his client was explicitly told by Google that spending more on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising would improve his organic search rankings.
The accusation was shocking to many on the topic of Twitter because Google has long insisted that the use of advertising does not have a direct impact on organic ratings.
Google advertising and search policy
Google has long claimed that there is a firewall between the paid side and the organic side and that the two sides do not communicate.
Amazing Google Request Alleged
As Google maintained this separation between the paid and organic sides of Google, a search marketer expressed shock on Twitter after a customer was asked to pay Google’s PPC sales to increase their spending in order to increase their rankings.
“Shakedown” from a Google Ads client?
The word “shakedown”It has several meanings, including extortion. Extortion means making someone pay for something for the strength of a threat. It is a word that denotes corruption.
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Appropriately, the word shakedown evokes the image of holding someone upside down by their heels and shaking money out of their pockets.
“I’m still not sure how to sue the fact that Google just shakedown one of our customers. In essence, they were told to spend more on paid ads to improve organic search * for their brand. * “
“For a long time, we who worked in SEO knew that Google would do this, but Google has always denied it.
It was really different to see them say it out loud. “
The person insists that this is not a misunderstanding
Naturally (and reasonably), some asked if it was possible that this was a communication failure.
Could it have been a misunderstood version of “if you increase brand exposure through advertising, more people can do brand research and improve their results too”?
– Ammon Johns♞ (@Ammon_Johns) January 7, 2021
The response of the person who reported the alleged incident was no, they said it was not a communication error.
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They said the alleged request from the Google seller was unambiguous. They said the Google Ads seller had explicitly linked improving organic ratings to an increase in advertising spend.
This was not just something that was supposed to have been communicated orally. The person reporting the alleged incident said the Google seller did this in writing in an email.
“Fortunately, our client forwarded the email with a“ holy shit, I can’t believe they put this in writing. What do you think?”
We have sophisticated and intelligent customers. “
“I need to ask you to trust me when I say it was a blatant quid pro quo. I prefer not to be more specific in public now, while I wait to see if this is new or not. “
Google’s Danny Sullivan intervenes
Perhaps no one was more concerned than Danny Sullivan.
He stopped at the discussion tweet a reply:
“Spending on advertising will not increase your SEO. Not at all. And if you want to send me the information, I’ll contact the @GoogleAds team to track why. Because it should never be said, because it absolutely doesn’t work like that. “
Someone replied that PPC should not leverage organics to sell more ads.
Glad you clarified Danny, but it really should be resolved. It cannot be used as a leverage to sell ads, especially now that companies simply don’t have the money to spend
– Dara McGann (@darasRantings) January 7, 2021
Danny Sullivan of Google confirmed that he had already acted.
“It will be resolved. I’ve already sent some emails about it now. I suppose that perhaps the representative is referring to some studies. I remember that users can sometimes click more on ads or unpaid search results when both are present. What is NOT a way to increase your SEO ranking … ”
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In response to someone else, Danny replied:
It is very easy to solve. If any of our advertising representatives are saying this, I hope they receive a very strong reminder that they should never say that. I also hope that you have already been instructed to never say something like that, as all Googlers are informed.
– Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) January 7, 2021
The discussion ended silently with the original poster confirming that Danny had contacted her.
for people after that, I confirmed that Danny got in touch via DM. In addition, I must maintain customer confidentiality.
– Melinda Byerley (@MJB_SF) January 7, 2021
Separation of organic search and PPC from Google
Google was originally an ad-free service. This helped Google to gain popularity because the other search engines were overwhelmed with banner ads, making search a bad user experience.
So when Google finally introduced advertising, they promised that the advertising side would never influence organic search rankings.
Although, over the years, Google has been accused of coordinating with the paid search side to show poor search results in order to encourage more ad clicks, these were generally ideas from the peripheral corners of search marketing, theories of baseless conspiracy.
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Most people in the Twitter discussion seemed to believe that the alleged incident was not a normal event. Read the Twitter discussion here.