Today Mike Grehan wrote an article for ClickZ entitled "The SEO and the Blacksmith". Near the end of explaining how SEO has evolved, he says: "Not only that, a top ranking position is becoming more important as search engines test new methods of presentation, and organic (or natural) results are forced further down the page, below the fold."
I thought this part of his article and what followed was a perfect follow up to my last post "Advertising and Mixed Motives" as he then said: "Today, I searched for the Beatles' "Sergeant Pepper" album at Google, which is now testing images folded into the top results. As my colleague Greg Ives points out, with three paid results at the top of the pile at Google (try a search for "halloween costumes") and often with some Froogle results thrown in at the top (and maybe even some news results), that all important top 10 hit is rapidly becoming an all important top 5 hit just to be seen." (In case "halloween costumes" only shows 2, try "Sponsored Links").
Greg's post on "Have You Seen the New 3rd Ad Position In Google?" says: "It makes it very important to participate in paid search and do it well. More advertisers will be competing for these top three positions. Companies that have focused on only search engine optimization have to jump on the advertising bandwagon and start doing paid search sponsored listings." Obviously this was Google Corporate's reason for doing it, along with being competitive with most, if not all, the other search engines that already have 3 Sponsored Links at the top!
But, is this good for the consumer-user? If there are more "Vertical Creep" Images or News at the top of the result's page it can add relevancy to my intent. However, more "Sponsored Links", in my opinion, could add more relevancy as a "picture is worth a thousand words", and news is more informational than "commercial". But, it has been my experience that I get more relevancy to my intent out of the natural, organic listings. Studies on this have concluded that I am not alone in my opinion.
Will it progress to the point that TV advertising has with DVR's and TIVO eliminating commercial advertising for a price? Also, if Disney can offer next-day iTunes downloads of TV shows ("The downloads will be priced at $1.99 per episode, the same as iTunes will charge for music videos. The service sells songs for 99 cents each.") without advertising, will paid subscription (No PPC or inevitable display advertising) SERP's be far behind? Or, are the majority of naive, general public, online search users, who usually are in a hurry to find what they want on the SERP, not noticing or caring right now about the difference between paid and organic search result listings? What do you think?
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