Importance:
Medium
GG expresses his opinion on commercial vs. info sites in Google serps.
GoogleGuy Says: [
Link to quote]
Hey Think, welcome to WebmasterWorld. I can try to give you my personal take. I absolutely agree that both commercial sites and info sites provide value to the user. At different times, a user may want either commercial results because they want to buy something, or they might just be looking for info. We want to return what we think the user is looking for, whether it be commercial or info. Historically, Google often started more as a research tool/informational resource. If you did a search for something like "sex," for example, Google was much more likely to give G-rated informational pages than other search engines.
It's not a no-brainer to find the right balance. I think if you asked a sample of WebmasterWorld folks, they might lean toward returning more commercial results. My hunch is that if you asked regular users, they would want fewer commercial results in their search results than a typical SEO would prefer. As for me personally, as long as the user is happy, then I'm happy. I think that to find the right balance, we get valuable feedback from both regular users and from site owners. We'll keep doing our best to find the balance that makes users the happiest, but we're open to suggestions from both sides of the spectrum about how to make searching better.
