Hacker News Reader

Comment by hvass | Hacker News Reader

I am a bit confused about the argument about Expedia not being penalized because they are spending on AdWords, wouldn't great organic rankings reduce their paid budget? And if Google penalizes them for legitimate reasons I doubt they would cut their AdWords budget.

I am sure Matt will provide more info soon especially after what happened to RapGenius.

View on HN

Google did research that shows having organic rankings and paid ads, boosts your click rate significantly. So, it would be a mistake to stop advertising if you rank well organically. http://www.google.com/think/infographics/organic-impact-on-p...

This is nothing compared to what RapGenius did. This is a low quality, but legit link building tactic.

The author claims the articles are poor quality, but they aren't. The only red flag is commercial keywords as anchor text, which Penguin today does a good job of discounting.

Why is this legit? It seems bullshit to me, as an outsider, just another way if gaming the system.

Yeah, I don't understand how a company essentially paying bloggers to create links to their site is a legitimate method of ranking in a search engine. That sounds fundamentally broken and far from 'organic'.

Well, if the n-th useless top ten blog post about travel is "quality content" I'm seriously scared by the brainwash that the google-cutts philosophy of great content has already performed upon us.

I am aware of the study, even so, where does the Expedia AdWords spend come into play as an argument? So they get penalized - they won't cut AdWords obviously, they might even up it. They do not get penalized, they either cut their AdWords budget or it remains the same. Again, where is the incentive for Google to not penalize Expedia? Because the AdWords argument doesn't hold.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com