Will Google give a higher rank to a website which runs AdSense?

Matt's answer:

Today’s question comes from Nick Y., all the way from Vancouver. Nick asks, “Will Google give a higher rank to a website which runs AdSense? I’ve seen some SEO experts claim this. It makes sense to me, as Google is a corporation trying to maximize profit. Although, in my opinion, this would go against ‘don’t be evil.’ Which is it?” Good question, Nick. The answer is, Google does not– not, repeat not– give a higher ranking to websites which run AdSense. They’re completely independent. It’s not the case that if you run AdSense, you get any kind of boost in our ranking, or anything like that. So it’s definitely not the case that you get some boost because you run AdSense. Now, your second question was, well, isn’t this Google trying to maximize its profit? There’s been a lot of times where Google has basically said, yeah, we could make money by selling, you know, some banner ad on our homepage, but rather than annoy our users, let’s try to figure out a way to get long-term loyalty from our users. And the best way to do that is to protect them, and to help them, and generate the kind of search results that they’re going to be happy to come back for the next time around. So there’s definitely nothing in our search rankings where you will rank higher because you run AdSense. We try to take the long-term view, and that would be a very short-term amount of thinking to do. So don’t worry about that within the search results.

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

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