Google and its Page Ranking... how objective is it really

Today I was wondering, don't worry happens quite often, I was wondering what the trade-off is between Page-Ranking and AdSense. Page-Ranking is the algorithm used by Google to make a bit of sense of the vast amount of information on the web and add some sort of useful ranking to it when searched. AdSense is selling advertising space related to search terms. So, here I come: what if a big spender pays a lot for advertising related to a set of search terms... what happens to the integrity of page-ranking (as if) of the pages relating to those terms?

Furthermore, an increasing amount of e-businesses' revenue is directly related to the ranking of their site in Google, hence they try to influence (also known as SEO) the ranking mechanism with all sorts of methods. Think of the following things they probably do:

• Pay attention to keyword inclusion and placement. Research most relevant AND most searched for keywords/phrases. Balance these with niche keywords/phrases to hit nr 1 spot for these niches.
• Make sure especially your homepage in content rich!
• Create content-rich information pages to direct traffic to your site
• Submit your site to online directories
• Make sure you site is linked to from Blogger.com blogs, wiki, et cetera.
• Multiply and conquer. Create a community of related sites that link to each other.
• Create a structured sitemap page and submit it to Google Sitemaps
• Consider using Google’s advertising programmes (AdWords and AdSense) to attract visitors instead of purely optimizing site ranking on Google index criteria (can result in poor ranking on other seach engines).

Sending a site map to Google is relatively new, but consider the last bullet. SEO by means of AdWords and AdSense. There could be a trade-off regarding the objectivity of ranking, don't you think? Remember EPIC, will newspapers become the news source for the elite and will the rest eat Google's dogfood? Don't get me wrong here, I google as much as any other web user, only I have some second thoughts and once in a while roll my own search engine.

Filed in: Retrieval, Google.