[Foundation-l] Left on the Table, vs. Google's serving portion

[geni]

On 6 November 2010 01:20, Seth Finkelstein <sethf at sethf.com> wrote:
>        Nobody knows, because the unknown factor in such calculations
> is whether Google would continue to bless Wikipedia so heavily if it
> started running ads. You cannot assume that the current dominance in
> search ranking would be maintained. Google can - and does - tweak
> algorithmic factors, which then have profound effects on what types of
> sites rank highly.

Err from google's POV it's in their financial interest for sights that
feature their ads to be high in the SERPS. Large numbers of people
going to a site which doesn't host their ads means large numbers of
lost clicks on google ads.

As for  tweak algorithmic factors firstly it's already happened at
least once (there was a noticeable drop in wikipedia's Google SERPS
positions a few years back). Secondly since both bing and yahoo rank
wikipedia highly (in fact while I haven't checked recently for a long
time google ranked wikipedia lower than those two) it seems unlikely
that any reasonable algorithmic change would kill off wikipedia's
traffic.


-- 
geni