So who replaces the commercial sites in the ranking then?

It seems that the top-20 results have a high population of government sites (.gov), educational sites (.edu), non-profit sites (.org), directories and non-US sites. Since these kind of sites have not been voracious advertisers on Google, analysts believe that ranking them high would not effect Google’s revenues and therefore puts pressure on commercial sites to go the Google AdWords PPC route.

From where would Google get the ‘Money Words’ list?

Google has access to a large database of ‘money words’ from their AdWords program. Interestingly, the advertisers and commercial site owners have themselves educated Google on which words are ‘good’ money words. Since bids on each keyword phrase vary, Google also knows how ‘valuable’ each keyword is.

So what’s the real story? Is Google actually filtering commercial sites using a ‘money words’ filter list?

Personally, I believe that nothing can be farther from the truth. I strongly believe that Google is not ‘filtering’ sites, as the analysts believe. There is no ‘money words’ list. The popular ‘filter list’ theory is derived from the symptoms analysts are seeing, which in fact occur due to other reasons, as you will see in my next few articles.

It is true that one can notice a filtering-like effect in practice. We have reasons to believe that such an effect is actually a by-product of the new algorithm rather than intended. The new algo tends to affect commercial sites more than the non-profit ones. I would discuss this in detail in the subsequent articles and explain why this is actually happening.

Some time ago, a site was setup by a ‘Google Hate Group’ which offered a tool to check your ‘unfiltered’ old ranking results at Google by extracting data from Google in a crafty manner. This site (www.scroogle.org) is no longer able to offer the facility since Google updated its algo to prevent such searches. However, the site still shows a so-called ‘Filter Hit List’ collected from various searches on its site. I studied the list and if anything, it validates that Google is not using any such list. How could one otherwise explain, that the term ‘California Divorce Attorney’ appearing at the top, is about 20 times more ‘valuable’ to Google than the terms ‘Books’ or ‘Adult’ which appear at the bottom of the list.

Any attempt by Google to filter commercial sites from the organic ranking would severely damage Google’s brand and credibility to serve unbiased search results. Such attempt, if true, would be extremely near-sighted, not worth risking a fantastic brand and service Google has come to create. The IPO as well as the bottom-line would be devastated. Besides Google says it has different groups working on ‘Search’ and ‘AdWords’ and one group cannot influence the other. I believe them.