2004 Google Chief Engineer Craig Neville-Manning insisted that Google maintained a strict separation between the search index part of Google and the paid advertising part. Sometimes this separation was referred to as a “Chinese Wall” between organic search engine results and paid search engine results, but this terminology fell out of favor once Google started trying to gain suction in the harshly competitive market in China, and the recent Google in China drama has definitely kept the term buried, but that’s another whole story.
The question is, does Google still live up to this separation between paid and organic results? They insist that Adwords is totally separated from organic search engine placement, that the two are in parallel channels and as such will never meet. What exactly does this mean in practice?
Adwords Ad Sitelinks
Today, Google has introduced a new Adword’s feature called ‘ Ad Sitelinks ‘ which gives Adwords advertisers the opportunity to deep link into selected landing pages on the one ad block.
Interesting concept, no doubt inspired by organic site links. But unlike organic sitelinks , advertisers are able to specify exactly how many Ad Sitelinks to show, their anchor text and the URL of the landing page.
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PPC Audit Guest Post by Steve Loszewski
Popular pay per click programs include Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM), and Microsoft adCenter. If you have accounts in these programs, you’re probably interested in improving them to increase (or achieve) profitability. There are a number of ways to improve a pay per click account – what follows is a summary of some of the most common methods in identifying and improving elements of a campaign. Google AdWords is given heavy focus in this article, although many of the concepts can be applied to YSM and MSN as well.
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