I have been paying for google Adsense for almost 1 year. The ads have certainly more than paid for themselves. But no matter how many times I submit my site (www.holt-realty.com) I just can't seem to get top placement. No matter what key words I search for I am nowhere near the top 40, or even the top 100 in some cases.

This is very frustrating, because I have paid Google a lot of money and I should think it would make sense for them to treat paying customers better than this.

What are your thoughts on this? Should Google give priority listings to paying customers or not?

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Marc Holt
http://aardvarkzone.com and aardvarkzone.com/holtblog/

If you're willing to pay, then it would be in their best interest not to give you a good ranking so they keep making money.

SEO is a completely different animal than AdWords, and I think it should stay that way. If not, will someone like us ever be able to sell anything when Amazon carries most of the same products as we do? They spend a ton of money on AdWords, probably much more than we sell in a year. Many industries could end up being that way if it made a difference in organic results.

That's my 2-1/2 cents worth. I'll go back to my work of optimizing our site to come out in organic search ahead of Amazon again.

Brian.

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ToolBarn.com, an Internet Retailer Top 500 and Inc. 500 Company | Tool Parts | Pet Supplies

That never helps and wastes your time.

Google have said many times, that Adwords participation does not and will not influence the organic search results.

CBP

For good reason, as said above these NEED to be treated as different animals. At some point the concept of a search engine became a solely commercial tool in thought. The idea of organic results and google claim to fame is displaying a fast-reponding list of results ordered by how relevent they are to what was searched.

Not to state the obvious with that, but if money has anything to do with relevence, then i am unaware of the connection.
Isnt this "paid for inclusion" what killed so many other SE's in the past. Where you describe only favored treatment, since every important search would get 10 of those to fill the first page, all the others may as well have just been excluded.

In my humble opinion, if word of Google showing favorites in any truly signifcant way got out, MSN would smile and take over as the new king. Distorted organic results are a form of spam.

BTW - I cant believe i actual read and visit any forum, I thought I would never find one of steady interest. Thanks guys for an excellent newsletters in a web of mindless dribble.

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Charlotte newspaper

Hmm..I wonder aloud, with all of the pervasive reports of Google Adwords PPC fraud, what would be the criteria for SERPs? More money bid for keywords or more clicks received? Banned if your credit card is temporarily declined.

No, I would drop my Google search bar in a New York minute if the natural serps were disrupted in anyway, spammers not withstanding.

Sometimes I honestly can't believe the illogical b.s. that people on this site want to happen. For whatever reason, some of you people live in this twisted reality where you actually believe that your site is useful or the most informative and that it should be at the top of the result list on every search engine.

You paid Google to put an advertisement on the side of their search results. You are *not* paying them to rank your site higher... The moment Google lets people bribe them to rank sites higher, they will lose absolutely all of their integrity and honor. They will cease to be what makes them google.

Spend less time submiting your site to search engines and more time developing its content. Better content means more people will link to you, more links mean you're more popular with the community, more popularity equals a higher rating.

I hope the search results are never tainted by money.

Google Adwords is for paid advertising, regular Google search results are for organic, non-paid results. Google has become the best SE because of the clear distinction between the two.
I took a quick look at your home page and there are the usual errors made with site optimising - text images rather than straight text, no related back links, site navigation in images, and (finally - hope this helps!) tons of java in the html that the SE's have to wade through to get to the text of the site... To me, it's no wonder that your home page is far down the results list.

Alan Pattinson
www.PacificWebsites.com

Brian is right, Marc. Spending money on AdWords and submitting your site to Google multiple times will do nothing to improve your general SE results. You need to get a grasp of basic SEO principles and apply these to your site. In a nutshell...

• Research your targeted keywords. Are you targeting the right ones?
  
  Put your keywords in your page titles, headings (H1, H2 etc), links, meta tags and sprinkled throughout your text
  
  Add lots of theme-specific, keyword-rich content
  
  Submit to as many directories as you can
  
  Start exchanging links with good quality, high PageRank sites. Try to get your link on a page that has good PR and include your targeted keywords in the link.

It's a simple as that Marc. It takes time and effort, but it's entirely achievable.

Steve

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Small Business Website Designer | Create Your Own Web Site
Small Business Web Consulting, Website Design Solutions, Hosting & Marketing

Comparing Google to another information medium, say newspapers or TV news may illustrate this.

If you buy a full page ad in a newspaper or a 30 second spot on the evening news does this mean they should do a feature article or fluff piece about your business?

Newspapers and TV stations sometimes do this and it tarnishes their reputation and makes readers/viewers question their credibility.

The effect is even greater with a search engine since it is not as passive a medium as print or broadcast. Those who said Google would be foolish to do this are absolutely right.

And if Google began doing this on your behalf you would be the first to complain that people were no longer searching on Google.

Andi

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...the Rockies may tumble, Gibralter may crumble... G & I Gershwin, 1937

Search engines were meant to index the growing number of web pages in a categorical fashion. They did not start out with a grand "financial plan" for commercial use. Unfortunately, that has evolved over time because the SE's took advantage of people whining and moaning that they couldn't get on top because they would not take the time to learn optimization or develop their content properly.

I've watched and participated in the evolution of SEO since 1996 (when Infoseek would index pages within 24 hours!) What was unfair was allowing deep pockets to occupy space in the top listings along-side of sites rich with content, structure and countless hours of careful cultivation.

The original SE's "indexing of relevant content" premise was and now forever is tainted because you can have a REALLY lousy site but buy your way to the first page.

I think Adwords and the Googles main search results should be kept the same. If they didnt give you more priority within their main Google search results just because you bid and Adwords, then their main Goolge search results will not be as targeted for the searches that people do.

If you want to get your site higher within the Googles main search results then just bidding on Adwords won't do anything. You will need to do SEO just like any other webmaster on the Web that has their site in the top 10 of Googles main search results.

You don't even need to submit your site, infact you are just wasting your time when submitting your site. All you need to do is exchage links with other sites and you site should eventually get into Google. All you have to do then is to keep working on your SEO. There more SEO you do and the better you do it the better your outcome will be...

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Here is my 2 cents of thoughts being a SEO from where Mark is located and I have even worked with him.

The main reason why we call the SEs as business equalizers is:

1 - You can't buy the results with your money:
1a- Because you have $illooooons of it to spend
1b- Because you are big mogul
1c- Because you have Zillions of people working for
you

2 - Even a tiny-weanie street stool owner has the ability/right to beat your mogul 1500+ interconnected websites in the Serps (check for video stalls websites in some cities around the world which beats the biggest Hollywood based mogul Movie companies).

And most of all because I have been smoking this particular brand 4 packs a day for the last 20 years and spend maybe one of the biggest income for that company as a single customer, this JUST DOES NOT give me the privilege to jump to the head of the queue.

If you are spending money on AdWords, IMO you don't have the skill or know-how to get your website in the SERPs. Because if you did, you would be in top 10 and obviously wouldn’t need to spend a cent on it.

The reason I say is my website simple-biz.com is in the top 10 of any major SEs SERPs for simple website design in most of the cases out of 15 MILLION+ and I don't spend a cent neither for myself or for my customers.

The best I can advice is to wake-up to the reality that there are people out there spending their good money on SEO companies to get higher results in the SERPs rather than spending their money on the advertising campaigns or trying to learn how to go about it on their own.

You can read one of my simple must have SEO suggestions at: http://forums.seochat.com/showthread.php?t=1126&page=1 if you want to do it on your own or can't afford one of the SEO gurus in this board.

My best wishes,

Advertising is advertising, you said yourself that ad sense was more than paying for itself. Now if you want the page ranking, turn your site into one that most folks want to visit.

If you want to be an advocate, work on the subject of sites that come back high in ranking, but aren't relevant to the search topic.

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Jeff Sundin, Professional Fishing Guide - WannaBe Webmaster

Marc,

Google is a search engine that tries to return relevant results based on popularity and content of the site. It would defeat that purpose to give more weight to a site in the "organic" listings simply because that site has bought advertising from Google. There is already space provided for that in their sponsored listings. You have bought advertising from them, not a placing in their results.

Ads for your site used by Google do nothing to enhance your placement in the search engines. They may actually hurt your chances in Google. I'm not sure why, but I experimented with them and found a site I administered went down in the results when using AdWords (not AdSense) and returned to its usual higher spot after stopping.

When I visit your site, it really doesn't shout "Thailand" to me. It shouts "Holt Realty." However, in Yahoo for the search "Thailand property sales" minus the quotes, your site is #11. Dropping the word "sales" from the search, it falls to #13.

For some reason, Google hit the travel/geographical sites hard with their "Florida" update last year. The result was that sites such as yours were blown away in their listings and replaced with more generic sites such as directories.

In any event, you appear to be in a very competitive field. I would recommend that you get more relevant sites linking to yours with your chosen search term used as the anchor text.

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DrTandem's San Diego Web Page Design, drtandem.com

Not. Definitely not. Never.

As well as SEOs, we are also users. If I had to wade through paid positions to find the stuff that ranked on relevance or merit I'd go freakin' mad.

I agree with some of what Hua said. However, a company/individual with a lot of money can buy a lot of quality links on other relevant sites and thereby enhance their placings.

It is very easy to use a fairly unique search term and be placed in the top ten. This is not really an advantage, because very few will search using that term.

Lastly, many big companies don't spend a lot of money, if any, on their placement in the search engines. The reason is they use traditional advertising which has a far higher ROI and it is much easier to control than the crap-shoot of the search engines.

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DrTandem's San Diego Web Page Design, drtandem.com

I think it's a popular question in many minds, and I understand why someone would think - or hope for better placement as a paying customer of a 'service'. But I think the answer lies in understanding what a search engine is.

I'm not saying Google's organic results are always ideal (as WPW member ~0 showed me, compare Yahoo and Googles serps for "home" and see how they differ), but organic results should only be about relevancy, not money. That's what paid ads are for.

On no terms should an organic search engine's integrity be compromised by financial transactions.

Hi Marc,

I have to go along with the concensue on this, Marc. If $$$ buys position, then there's no need for ranking. Without some way to relate what's on a page to the value the page, then there's no need for Google. If there's no need for Google, then there's no need for your ad.


Well, you might begin by at least working with them ... just a wee bit, anyway.

First, your Home page description is twice as long as most search engines will allow.

Second, the first 10,000+ characters after your <body> tag are used up by JavaScript. Search engines stop looking through your page long before they reach any text to look at.

Hence, no page relevance. Hence, poor search engine position. And, I should imagine that it's not limited to Google, either.

Good luck with your fixes.

Hal

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Baughan & Company offers personalized Web site support to small business. http://www.rocksolidsite.com

You can already pay to be highly ranked in Google's organic results, even though Google doesn't make anything off the deal.

Buy a non-reciprocal text link with your keywords from a high PR site (7+) and watch what happens to your ranking.

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I think this leads back to a give and take discussion we had before. I think integrity of the search engine as a whole is the key issue with this, and since you are their customers as much as they are yours. I think we all agreee google is making way more money off of our content than any one or 1000 people here making off the use of theirs.

If they lose face, they lose their shirts. So it is in everybodys best interest that they do not taint the results. And to treat paying customers in this way is at the same time going to penalize non-paying users, which makes up 99% of the people cisiting the site everyday. Just my humble .02

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Charlotte newspaper

1) No...absolutely not. They aren't the same thing.

2) If you want to get found...carefully focus your keywords. I looked at your site and your metatags and you're trying to cram every single keyword (except the ones I would have used to search for :-) into one page. Don't. Choose a keyword/phrase to focus on for each page. It's called 'optimization'.

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The best resellers membership site also has the best monthly newsletter. No ads. No pitches. Just great articles and free resale rights products! Reselling4Profit.com ...where YOUR profit is our product

Marc Thai, you can buy page rank at Google!!
It's called Ad-Words a.k.a. Paid Advertising!!

A Paid Page Rank in the Standard Search Results will turn a Search Engine into a commercial index of everything you weren't looking for.

Think about it! If you allow Paid Page Rank in your Search Engine it's no longer a Search Engine; it's an index.

A search engine, to many users, is either a tool to find pages based on relative content or a tool to reach users searching for specific content. The search engines soon became targets of spammers. Like cancer, highly SEO'd pages of "crap" designed for click throughs and traffic generation began to grow on search engines as a result of the open submission methods enjoyed by all not so long ago.

If page rank can be purchased in the standard search results then it will be exploited and again the Search Engines will become more of a paid for strictly commercialized index of what your weren't looking for.

I rest my case MarcThai.

I strongly disagree that paid advertising on search engines has in any way "tainted" them. What taints them is when they try to disguise these ads as organic listings, and surfers are a savy bunch who won't tolerate being misled. Just ask yahoo and MSN. They have as much to do with Googles success as Google does. SE ads are ads. Organic listings are organic listings. The two should never meet.

I think that the advertising on any search engine should either be to the side or at the bottom. I dont think it should be ranked above the sites that are optomized so as to get a good ranking in the search engines. Some search engines make you go past all the paid advertisements in order to get to the real searches. thats my opinion on it thanks everyone.
www.earnmoneyonlinebiz.com

It seems your problem boils down to one thing. You want higher ranking with your keywords. Unless you hire someone in the SEO field, you can't buy SEO.

Just by viewing your page's source I see a few problems right away. You have way too much javascript over your HTML. Try referencing this coding on .js file instead. Search engines see this as main content and since it doesn't properly contain your keywords or reflect HTML they stop there or shortly thereafter because it just looks like mumbo jumbo.

You have very few keywords in your keywords tag (although they are specific which is good). I would add some more.

I'm assuming your keywords of choice are "Thailand Real Estate". Use this phrase in your document's title. Use this phrase in your keywords tag (they can be phrases you don't have to limit to words). Use this phrase in your description... you get the idea.

In order to optimize your search engine rankings, all you have to do is take some time to ensure that your keyword phrase is actually used properly within your site's coding.

Advertising is something different and won't get the effect your looking for.

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Tish
http://www.sonoraneye.com
http://www.asktorah.com
http://www.assemblyofisrael.com

Treat your site as a business and chances of success will be greater than average. If you were self employed and just starting out would you hire some one for each job, NO! If you do you will be one of the 90% of failures within the first 5 years.

Take time to learn how to market your website in a cost effective manner, if you have a P4 or higher site you really do not need to use GOOGLE adwords, you need to spend time reading so that your learn how to achieve high ranking with out spending a fortune. I have seen some great answers above so I will not bother repeating them over.

When using the information above, study the individuals site. Check there keywords! What is there ranking on these keywords! If they rank high then I would use that information on your site, if they only rank high on 1 or 2 keywords then I would take the information with a grain of salt.

What is their PR? If the person giving advice has a low PR site with GOOGLE you will need to check their keyword ranking before making a decision.

The number of links pointing to your site is not alone going to give you a higher PR, high PR is achieved by.

1. How many pages does your site have the more pages the more high PR sites needed to link to you.
I have seen site with a PR5 that have only a handful of links and this is achieved by not having many pages.

Hope this helps!

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Very true. But keep in mind that some "general" key words and phrases are so inundated with users that using specifications is the only way to improve them. Take mine for example at SonoranEye.com. You may not find my site very easily under the coveted key phrase "web design", however, type in "custom internet banners" or "custom book covers" and you'll find me right away.

Tracking referring URLs will show you what search engine was used to find your site as well as the keywords used to get there. Over time, this can help you determine the keywords and phrases that can increase your exposure the most.

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Tish
http://www.sonoraneye.com
http://www.asktorah.com
http://www.assemblyofisrael.com