Is Adwords Crooked?

[PTC]

I've also heard some pretty big people from other industries say that if you have a large ad budget with google, you can get away with a lot more borderline activities.

Does anyone believe in this?; if so how do you think things will play out in the UK gambling market? Will this help small niche sites gain popularity or polarize the market even more? Will there be different kinds of effects for different kinds of keywords; maybe the low converting (but popular) terms will be easy to go after?

[CorryC]

I think that there is definitely a lot of that going on with Adwords. It is like that with anything though. If you are providing some sort of service or product to people, you always want to make sure your big customers are happy. In Google's eyes, the big guys deserve to get away with more (they pay for it).

As for the UK gambling market, it will probably be the same way. The guys with the big time money will more than likely completely take over the sponsored ads. Then again, there might be a lot of long tail type keywords that would be cheap, but I would guess that even those would be taken over (probably on accident).

I know for a fact that the big guys get away with more when it comes to Adwords, and I do understand why. I may not agree with it, but it is just the way it is.

[Tim]

What do you mean by borderline activities?

[PTC]

What do you mean by borderline activities?

As far as organic SEO related stuff, I think this would pertain to buying links mostly. Companies with huge ad budgets for their main keywords are not likely to get penalized in the organic results. As far as adwords, I asked because I had a campaign suspended last night that was promoting a clickbank product which has some copyright issues. The larger people promoting the same product are all still listed under sponsored results and I thought this might explain it.

[Tim]

No I disagree. Those with big budgets for PPC are obviously going to have big budgets for SEO too. One should not jump to the assumption that there's a link because a site is top on PPC and doing well in the SERPS. Google says the two are seperate and while I don't believe everything they say, I believe this. It's not in their interests (long term).