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Forget #1 PPC Spot; Greedy Google Grabs It
A colleague and I were recently doing a search when we came across Google in the PPC and organic listings. At first we thought it was a Google marketing push for Google Maps. However, after doing more research, it looks like Google is trying to promote their local coupon search.If you do a search on the word “coupons” you will see that Google.com is the number one result in the Sponsor results.
We also did a search on “pizza coupons” Google was ahead of Pizza Hut in the sponsor links.
After doing a search on “Marco’s Pizza Coupons” Google’s directory came up number 5. You know it’s only a matter of time before its number one.
Can you imagine the PPC dollar they could inflate by placing their PPC campaigns to number one? I hope this isn’t going to be a constant for Google because how can a small business – say your local pizza shop – compete with them in rankings for key terms. I guess the new trend will evolve to competing for the number 2 spot verses the number one. I don’t think this is very ethical on Google’s part, but I guess that’s business!
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4 Comments so far4 Responses to “Forget #1 PPC Spot; Greedy Google Grabs It”
[...] has started to advertise their Coupon search capability (thanks to FathomSeo for great screen shots of this and the heads up) with Google [...]
Interestingly I see these listings are now gone…
Nice find and examples…gives new meaning to being #1 on PPC.
I checked up on the organic listing and noticed that today they are on the second page of the results. Interesting!
I don’t think this is the first time that some of their tactics were perceived to be borderline unethical… The saga continues.