We were the creators & optimizers of a first rate quality site (on one of the top competitive businesses) on the Internet that generated all of its traffic from editorial search results.

In the past, our consistency and strenuous efforts always made our site prevail as we sturdily tried to kept pace with the dynamic algo updates on search engines vis-à-vis the top rankings for its competitive keywords. It is one of those authority sites that the search engines call them.

As this site has been our bread and butter for us for all these years, we rigorously scrutinized our competitor sites; monitored various PPC advertisers and other editorial sites that came up on those competitive keywords search results.

We also came across PPC advertisers who worked hard on their ad copy on search engines to generate surfer attention from its paid listings and hence the clicks, but never had the common sense to make those little changes within their sites to maximize conversions from the traffic, if visitors reached their site.

And then we had sites that somehow managed to come up in the editorial results but again with the same poor presentation and a weak site model that attracted less traffic.

As different kind of sites competed on the first search engine result page, our site always managed to get away with maximum traffic on that keyword and the traffic converted very well, once it hit the site.

There is no underground secret to this information. Search Engines keep a track of all sites with special attention to sites that attract the maximum traffic from their results on competitive targeted keywords.

Search Engines monitor the revenues that they generate from their Paid Advertisers on various competitive keywords and set the prices on each of these keywords as per their search competitiveness.

This needs no PHD, but the focus of search engines is to get as many clicks from the visitors on such expensive keywords so that their advertisers dole out more money as they opt for these keywords.

And one day, we saw our site being removed from the SERPS. We didn't bother to look back into our site's optimization or hop on to a forum to reach out to other webmasters or SEO's. We knew it that the people working with the Search Engines had finally arrived at our site and analyzed it thoroughly. After all, we were their biggest competitors; taking away the majority of the traffic for the keywords that should triggered for their paid advertisers listings.

Did other competing sites get removed? Well, in the first place, not many serious players (competitors) from this industry had survived the previous algorithm updates with only the Search Engines themselves and their Advertisers left to compete with.

The new search results now show some search engine friendly sites like informative sites not based on any revenue model and spam sites.

Before anyone gives us an archaic SEO logic, here is our analysis: (and we are sure that all veteran web users and optimizers would unanimously agree)

"None of these editorial results or sites generates decent conversions as they are not relevant for the keyword. Visitors will always end up clicking on those expensive advertisers ads up there, still looking for relevancy, while our site would continue to be lost in the maze to never come back ever again."

- Managing Director
Victim of Unfair Trade Practices