That’s got to be the lamest claim that I have heard during my career. There seems to be a whole lot of folks (underground marketers) who believe that advertising on Google as No. 1 actually pushes you down in search engine rankings. Now, I am all for fascinating conspiracy theories such as governments hiring UFOs and things like that. However, just because you are ranked No. 1 on the paid section of the SERPs doesn’t mean that Google will penalize you.

Google makes a lot of money from folks that are obsessed with the No. 1 position. Their business is built around maximizing the amount of money they snag from advertisers. However, for Google to think that it can create even more hunger for the No. 1 position in the paid section but penalizing organic listings, the folks there should be smoking something.

Google does talk about how being in No. 1 position is wonderful for your business. However, they simply have no interest in pushing people down in the rankings for no reason. At the end of the day, the organic search is very volatile and you can move from position No. 1 to nowhere in matter of days with no apparent reason. Believe it or not that happens to a lot of people (including top SEO pros). So my answer to this question is, stop blaming others and start looking at what is it that you are doing wrong. Maybe it’s that the competition is growing stronger. Maybe you are leaking page rank, or your site-map is broken. But if you don’t believe me, just turn your PPC campaign off and see if you can recover your organic position. Can’t get more simple than that, can it?