SEO Blog

I was doing some grocery shopping the other day, walking through the produce department and inadvertently threw a couple of organic veggies in my cart and headed for the checkout. After digesting the rancid price tag of the free-loading organic items, I began to stew on the term organic. My veggies, as it turns out, are either, manufactured on large corporate-owned farms, or they are natural, meaning raw, of the earth, and decidedly unmanufactured. The same can be said for search results – those two links in a search results page, like two similar looking yellow peppers in a grocery store shelf, can be quite different.

Like my veggies, search page results fall into two different categories: organic search results and advertisements. Organic search results only appear in the search page results if they have an association with the user’s search string. In this way, the results are unmanufactured. Manufactured results are advertisements slipped into the search page by the search engine companies to look-like the organic search results. In this way, the advertisements are manufactured. When you contact an SEO firm, the power they possess is to increase your standing in the organic search page results. 

The truth of the matter is that the search page results of the major search engines are a mix of advertising and organic search results with the advertisements often designed to mimic the appearance of search results. This mimicking trend has developed to such a point that many search engine users cannot tell the two apart, but this is nothing new. A 2005 study conducted by the PEW/Internet and American Life Project, entitled “Search Engine Users: Internet searchers are confident, satisfied and trusting – but they are also unaware and naïve” found that “–only 38% of users are aware of the distinction between paid or “sponsored” results and unpaid results. And only one in six say they can always tell which results are paid or sponsored and which are not. This finding is ironic, since nearly half of all users say they would stop using search engines if they thought engines were not being clear about how they presented paid results.” More recently, some major search engines have begun to offer slight visual differentiators or clues to distinguish between the two types of results – claiming, it’s only good business sense to do so.

Another underlying component of organic search results is that they are purported to be completely non-biased – that is to say, that the search engine company will not accept any amount of cash to influence an individual site’s ranking. With this stipulation in mind, organic search results help to keep the search engines running clean.