I'm now absolutly convinced that Google has a way of adjusting SERPS to tie in with Adwords spend. The Adwords spend drops, your results drop - you have to increase your Adwords spend to compensate. Time and time again. I hope I'm wrong, but, let's face it, if I were looking at this from within the Google office, I'd be doing the same thing. Discuss!
Are you talking about organic listings? Your organic placement drops when your spend in adwords drops? I think you should take off your tinfoil hat
How is it possible then that sites that aren't advertising through AdWords are on top of the results? Judging by your logic the advertising sites would be in front and all other sites would be after that.
One thing doesn't have anything to do with the other. SERPs are constantly changing, some of your competitors also might have invest in advertisement and from this their sites get listed better than yours.
I have to agree with these replies - I don't use AdWords and remain in the top for several keywords for several sites. Additionally in some cases I appear in several of the top ten for a single keyword or phrase without dropping a dime in AdWords spending.
Don't blame google for your rankings drop. Most of the pages rank higher in SERPs don't have Adwords. You can check it by yourself.
I have to agree with this in a SMALL manner. Just for the sake of the discussion. I have a client that spent about $30/day with Adwords, and his website was going relatively well in the SERPS (with about 10.000 pages indexed). After about 2 weeks he stopped the Adwords campaign. After 3 days, the website's pages dropped to about 1000, and the SERPS went to nowhere (anyway much lower then before). He started an Adwords campaign again, the website went back to the initial status. This could be just a mere glitch or purely a coincidence. But ...
This is totally, totally not true, at least not in our companies experience. We have many many sites that we have never had to spend 1c on adwords for and the sites are all at #1 or #2 for their specific keywords (organic results). The only time we have found it neccessary to spend on AdWords is since 2005 - in the first 6 - 9 months of a domains life. Thereafter, we are in the top 5 and it makes no dfference if we stop adwords - we do not drop in the SERPS, and as time goes on we get to the top. This has been my experience with 46 different websites, all unique, different, client sites. I doubt very much that google would ever do such a thing as penalise you for stopping, reducing or dropping an adwords campaign. It would not be in their long term best interests to upset you, their existing client, as they want you to continue to advertise with them. If you stop one ad campaign you might start another ... why would they jeopardise the relationship? It makes absolutely no business sense for them to do that.
I am sorry to say that William is so wrong. We are talking six figure annual income here from AdSense ----and I don't know what Adwords is.
This seems a little unlikely to me. You claim a "six figure annual income from AdSense" and you are not aware that the AdSense ads that are displayed on your website are purchased by Google customers in the AdWords program?
An alternative explanation to come to the same results could be: In Google's algo they factor in actual visits to landing pages. Traffic. Toolbar data, packets that travel their fibre cabels, it can be/is all monitored. Say you enjoy good rankings and have a decent Ad campaign. Kill the campaign, your site drops in traffic. Algo detects drop in visits (no mattter where they came from) and thinks "this result must now be less relevant - let's drop it down a few notches". That hypothesis would explain the cause and effects without the actual relation claimed by WJ. From a business point of view, it would make sense at least a bit. Spend with us and you're our buddy.