There is an ongoing debate over at WebmasterWorld which has now been picked up by Tamar over at SER. Do Google manipulate organic search results to increase their advertising revenue? - Matt
Of course not! Do you realize how expensive it would be to pay for the labor to accomplish that, versus what little return there would be from AdSense payments?
How about if their algorithm purposely ranked less relevant results higher in an attempt to encourage users to click on their paid results which would naturally be more relevant? Personally I think it is complete and utter tosh but you can see where they are coming from. - Matt
I highly doubt they would risk their reputation for a few extra clicks, but you probably would never really know.
May be or May not be also.. as employing people to control millions of site is something like very great task and expensive also to google... but if they have this automated and everything is created in their algorithm then anything is possible as they are more advanced and use the technology which we aren't aware of so nothing to comment here
Consistently serving up irrelevant results isn't a strategy to get people clicking on sponsored results, it's a strategy to send your business to another search engine. So no, no I don't think they got to be the major engine on the net by being that stupid.
And how much would that algorithm cost to develop, implement, and test before rolling it out? Probably as much as a year of doing it by hand. Developer time is far more expensive than grunt time. Anyway, Google is able to profit from AdSense because of the (perceived) quality of its search and other products. The more Google users, the more AdSense impressions, and the more chance for clicks, which equal money. Remember, Google is playing the same game everyone else is - they're a for profit company. What's being described here is an example of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.
People who can't get google to like their sites, are always looking for a reason besides them just not being good at SEO.
You're right. Even they manage to embed it into their algo, it still needs resources and that will cost a lot.
Gambling and altering the serps positions to see if they can increase their revenue? lol LoL Google is about Searching..when there no longer interested in offering organic results and offer manipulated positions to increase CTR.... I think something like this would kill the search engine.. Its a form a greed.. and greed reaps bad things in the end.
Well, no body know for sure except for them, but they are saying it's completely an automated procedure ???