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Making it so all the top 10 natural results are AdSense-holding pages?

Actually, that's probably the one area Google won't go for, but it results in a smaller pool of people to make money off of, as consumers can't get the right answers to their questions.

The key needs to be high-quality content delivery. Without that, you leave yourself vulnerable to being banned.



Yet: there's an inherent tension. Unless there's a credible threat people will go to another engine for natural results, for Google to degrade their own natural results slightly can improve Google's quarterly revenues!

Let's say Google is A/B testing a ranking tweak. Option A results in more searches (because people don't find exactly what they're looking for on the first try), and more clicks on ads (because they look relatively better). Option B results in one click on a natural result and nothing further.

Are we sure they'll always choose option B?

Maybe Google can add a new advanced operator: [-src:googlesyndication.com]. That is, don't return results that 'source' (as in <SCRIPT SRC="">) Google ad units.

I won't hold my breath.




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