Forum posts on google

[Randolph Rhett]

You can pay thousands a month in SEO, or thousands a month in direct Google ad buys. Without the one you would never justify the other.

Not sure what you're saying here. Paid search is much more expensive than SEO, also referred to as organic search. For a major consumer products company, you're talking millions in paid search for results that can be achieved for an investment of maybe tens of thousands in design and development costs. Most advertisers will fund some of both, but paid is a highly targeted supplement to organic, not the primary driver of traffic.

Also, the search algorithms can't thwart SEO efforts without also compromising search effectiveness.

The ad revenue comes from the paid advertising that you get along with the search results; Google and Bing and Yahoo make nothing off organic search results or click-throughs. Again, SEO analysts know how the search engines work, use that to make sure their pages rank highly in the algorithms' ranking (unique, geographically specific content highly relevant to the search query with many other sites linking to those pages), and all major advertisers do it. As I mentioned above, note how often Wikipedia pages come up highly ranked in the results. SEO analysts can ensure their pages meet the same criteria within the search algorithms. If you break the logic that works for the commercial sites, you break it for Wikipedia.

You and I clearly have different experiences. Perhaps there are companies that spend millions on Google adwords and similar ads, but not most of my clients. Likewise, SEO depends a lot on creating new content and/or content that is referenced on other sites. It takes thousands of dollars a month to create fake "reviews", meaningless "blog" content, set up websites with near duplicate content to "refer" to your website, etc. Keeping on the first page via SEO is often quite a bit more expensive for my clients that to just buy direct adveristement from Google.

I've had clients whose webpage ranks BELOW a half dozen competitors when the search term is their own trademarked product name. They feel they have no choice but to buy Google advertising.

Is there no way to filter out these manipulations? Perhaps not, but I can't help but notice that they do support rather than hinder Google's economic model.

[Steve Sawyer]

The sheer size of the client we work with probably does give a far different perspective, Randolph, as there is no need to manufacture links, reviews, bogus content, etc. making organic search much more cost-effective. But even they see competitors sometimes ranking higher as a result of a query containing the name of one of their products, but we try to repay the favor when we can!