Matt Cutts, webspam team’s head at Google talked about advertorials recently and followed it up with questions related to SERP subjectivity.
According to him, advertorials are like basic advertising only, but do portray a look of an editorial or natural content. A large number of people are of the opinion that the advertorial content is actually editorial in nature and the writer is not under the direct pay of the company. Advertorials passes PageRank often, which is a bit problematic since they don’t show a lot. If someone carries out this practise, then they should duly prepare themselves to face a few SEO penalties in not so distant future. To stay away from penalties, one requires to unveil the advertorial properties to Google. Here, a varied number of SEO optimization strategies can be followed.
Next in line was a question related to SERP subjectivity. He explained that the supposition related to this is quite contradictory in nature with people nurturing such views that Google fails to determine search query’ context. But he is sorry to disappoint those people, as he concludes that Google can successfully determine it. These are done by human testers easily, even if these people are not habituated with this entire thing.
He did inform that search engines can never be entirely subjective as these are human-made and they differ as far as their philosophy and the algorithms are concerned. Different search engines comes with different ideas and there exist no easy way in determining their “work” procedure.