Do AdWords customers get special treatment in organic search results?

Matt's answer:

Today’s question comes from Dublin, and it’s a good one. Christoffel asks, “I am an important AdWords customer, and recently I’ve seen a drop in rankings for my site. Why can’t I get advice on optimizing my site for Google search results through my AdWords point of contact?” Great question. We’ve answered and debunked the misconception a lot that if you somehow buy AdWords on the right hand side the page that it doesn’t give you any sort of algorithmic boost so that you’ll rank higher in the search engines. People understand that. We keep iterating that. There’s always a few conspiracy theories, but for the most part, people know that that’s true. At the same time, we wouldn’t want things to be unfair in the sense that, if you buy AdWords or if you’re a partner or a customer or a client, that you get some sort of special treatment or advice or access on the organic side as well. So if someone on the sales side were to write and say, hey, this person spends a lot of money, can you talk to them? That’s the sort of thing where the quality team has been trained to push back on that very, very hard. So we want to be as fair as possible. And that’s why, even if you buy AdWords, or if you work with us, you’re a client, customer, partner, whatever– we’re delighted to work with you. But the fact is, we would like you to go through the exact same support channels that anybody else on the web would have so that there’s no appearance of impropriety or anything along those lines that people think someone is getting special treatment in that way.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

Original video: