PPC Takes on Organic Results

Most of the time we see changes and developments on the Google front as axioms to which most companies react and adjust.  We assume that the giants that dominate the search engine world always get it right. Well the truth is that most of the time they do.  Almost always.   At one point or another.  But in the gap between 'almost always' and 'at one point or another', opportunities sometimes arise.  In his article of June 9th, Mark Jackson of Search Engine Watch highlights one of these opportunities.

While working on a client's PPC campaign, Jackson had noticed significant rises in PPC terms on organic results. How significant was this rise? Well, the client was ranking first for terms they had not done any natural work on, so long as these were non-competitive terms. The company, which sells property, ranked 1st on Google natural results for terms like "ga nc tn & tx land sale", for which no optimisation work had ever been done other than in PPC.

What accounts for this surprising turn of events? It transpires that Google web crawling has become so aggressive that it picks up results for Java scripts links, normally used by most parked domains to take the Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing ads from Google/Yahoo, and displays them.

The interesting part is that Google should not be able to give this attribution to websites being linked from PPC ads. The Overture and Google domains that collect traffic have robots that disallow this, so once the spider hits the site it should leave and not follow the redirection of the link. However, it seems that while Google has made significant advancements with Java, unintended consequences have included natural results for Java-based PPC activities.

The chances are that Google has already caught up with this and is working on correcting this 'problem' (from their perspective). This however, does have two significant implications as far as SEO specialists are concerned.

First, the time it will take Google to correct this anomaly leaves some room for natural gains through PPC activities. This doesn't mean that companies should base entire PPC campaigns on desired natural results, but it can be an element that comes into play when conducting well-rounded PPC campaigns.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, it does make one wonder what other opportunities may arise as Google strives to crawl through JavaScript, AJAX, Flash and similar elements. Keeping one's finger on the pulse of changes, opportunities and effects can indeed prove highly lucrative.

Innovation, proactivity and creativity can, from a results point-of-view, bare fantastic fruit.