Google has been progressively eating their own search results with...Google.

I hate to use Avril Lavigne as an example, but I am about to go to a sweet concert, so maybe this is ok. Looking at the following searches, notice how Google is promoting Google or sites that are editorially selected and trusted by Google.

Their music service promotes trusted resellers, their news service promotes trusted news sources, and their top ranking YouTube pages (promoted externally and internally and algorithmically favored) will eventually consist largely of trusted content providers.

This self arbitrage and backdoor partnerships as organic relevancy work on core popular search phrases:

and it scales on through to less popular phrases that are hot right now:

If you didn't understand what I was talking about in Google Closing the Window of Opportunity, the above images should do a good job of showing how search is moving away from purely algorithmic to an editorial blend approach, and how Google is making itself a leading vertical search engine in many verticals.

The easiest way for Google to be perceived as relevant is to make it easy for other authorities to want to talk about Google as being innovative and relevant. If Google is willing to send significant traffic to trusted sources how could those sources do anything but trust Google?

Rumor has it that eBay just bought the web 2.0 toolbar company StumbleUpon, which helps users stumble into new and interesting pages based on the votes of friends and others with similar interests. THE SAME DAY that rumor came out Google added a toolbar feature which recommends websites you might be interested in based on your recent search queries.

Competitive Intelligence & AdSense Funded Startups

Google's biggest advantage over their competitors may not even be the cheap computer cycles. It is probably consumer trust. StumbleUpon only had to raise $1.5 million in funding before being bought out, largely due to low cost structure, but also because they turned stumbles into unmarked ads, offered a sponsorship based model, and published AdSense ads on their site.

Google can buy out or clone any service that threatens their ad market and media dominance.

Asset Pricing & Public Relations

Since StumbleUpon was an AdSense publisher, Google saw their growth rate, and had better market data as to their value than eBay possibly could have. As soon as they started talking about sales, Google could make the best offer, or decide if it was just cheaper to clone something in-house, then overshadow competing news by adding the feature to the Google suite ahead of the buyout news.

Advertising leads to exposure, which leads to more exposure, which leads to market dominance. Now Google is recommending content. Maybe those same content sites chose to advertise with Google from time to time, or maybe they syndicate Google's ads and convert well. If you were Google, and you were recommending ads and content based on earnings wouldn't that lead to recommending biased content that converts?

Trademarks & the Sketchiness of Relevant Recommendations

Google maintains that they are legal with their keyword based ad targeting. Judges struggle with the cases:

"The large number of businesses and users affected by Google's AdWords program indicates that a significant public interest exists in determining whether the AdWords program violates trademark law," Fogel wrote in his decision.

Maybe they are legal, but when you get to content websites or contextually targeted ads you can't be certain why Google is displaying an ad. Is it site targeted? Page targeted? Geographically targeted? Automated based on a keyword and trademark in the page title, or personal character flaws, or conversion data?

Arbitraging Your Brand One Click at a Time

With pay per action ads Google turned the link into a virtually unmarked ad unit. They will likely control distribution based on how much revenue an ad makes Google. If you buy distribution from lead aggregators, and they buy Google CPA ads, their ads may be automatically targeted by Google against any media mentioning your company, at first you will think these aggregators are doing a great job, and you might even pay them a higher commission. But then you may start to notice fewer direct inquiries.

Upon further inspection some of these lead aggregators use domain names similar to your brand, like VillanovaU.com, and their ads appear on just about any content related to Villanova. Eventually you realize that you are best off brokering a deal directly with Google, so you do.

Introducing Google Tax

This is how Google will kill many mid market players and get a piece of the action for most large businesses. They will keep automating recommendations and arbitraging against your brands and trademarks until you decide to broker an ad deal directly with Google, and if you don't give Google a big enough cut they will just recommend an arbitrager, some high converting currently hot scam, or a competitor of some sort.

Affiliate marketers funded search and showed business the value of search before getting pushed around by ad quality scores. The lead aggregators will show businesses that they can just work directly with Google. Off the start the numbers will look great, and they will keep doing well until direct inquiries gradually decline as the Google Tax is applied.

I think Werty was the person who coined Google Tax, while he was between paintings, working on his garden.

Google can never show the most relevant results for everything. No matter what algorithmic loopholes they close they inadvertently open up others. And anything they trust gets abused by marketers.

• Search engines trusted page titles and meta descriptions. Marketers stuff them full of keywords. So then search had to move more toward trusting page content. Marketers used hidden text and other similar techniques.

• Search engines trust links. SEOs buy and sell them and create link farms. Search engines only allow some sites to vote, have some sites pass negative votes, make certain votes count more than others.
• Search engines place weight on anchor text. SEOs abuse it, so they created filters for too much similar anchor text, and offset those by placing more trust on domain names when they exactly match the search query.
• Search engines place weight on exact match domain names and domainers start developing nearly 100% automated websites.
• Too many new sites are spammy so they place weight on older sites. SEOs buy old sites and add content to them.
• Place more weight on global link authority. Spammers find cross site scripting exploits on .edu domains and media sites start posting lead generation advertisement forms on their sites.
• Bloggers are too easy to get links from and comment links are easy to spam. Search engines introduce nofollow to stop comments from passing PageRank. Then Matt Cutts pushed nofollow to try to get webmasters to use it on advertisements.
• Too many people are created automated sites, especially affiliates are creating a large number automated sites. Search engines employ human reviewers, get better at duplicate content detection, and require a minimum link authority on a per page level to keep deep pages indexed.
• Social news sites are providing a sea of easy link opportunities and low quality information. Too many people are doing linkbait. Perhaps Google may eventually only count so many citations in a given amount of time.

When your site changes in rankings it may not be just because of changes you made or changes in your field, it may also be due to Google trying to balance

• old sites vs new sites

• old links vs new links
• big sites vs small sites
• fresh content vs well linked pages
• exact match vs rough phrase match
• etc

Andrew Goodman recently posted about SEO industry reputation woes, but the real reason for the problem is the self serving agenda of search engines. Don't underestimate the marketing of the search engines, which outside of their own link buying and selling, generally like to hint at this equation SEO = spam.

People spam everything though - media creating biased news, misquoting interviewees, blending ads in content, ads as content, free votes driving communities, deceptive article titles, spinning numbers from small sample sets, bogus posturing formated as research studies, etc.

Look at how much Google had to clean their PPC ads. Yet we don't associate PPC service providers as people pushing thin content arbitrage sites, fraudulent search engine submission services, and off target cookie stuffing offer spams. Should we?

If spam is hosted by Google, ranked by Google, and displays Google ads, then why the need for outsourcing that fault? Why can't we just call those people Google affiliates and leave it at what it is, Google = spam?

Some people claim that Google is out for the best interest of their users, but why the need for cost per action ads that are only labeled as ads on a scroll over? Ads cloaked as content are what is best for users? In a couple years we will see:

The game is now to manipulate consumers not only to click, but to take some further action. And I don't use the word 'manipulate' arbitrarily. This is about turning the web into one big pile of junk mail, aimed at getting you to sign up, buy, or commit to something that you hadn't necessarily wanted.

Jen noticed that Google's Kim Malone announced that in the next couple months AdWords will start displaying content targeted ad locations.

Google AdSense pays most publishers crumbs for their ad space. People who are running AdSense ads are willing to sell ads. And sites that have AdSense ads on them are probably actively managed.

Is there a better way to get a list of relevant pages to acquire links from than to run a content targeted AdSense ad campaign and ping those webmasters?