We’ve had a fair amount of interest in the past while from those in the eMarketing game about our PPC/SEO tests which we have been running for a few months.

You can take a look at the first post here and the follow up findings here - but in a nutshell, we created two pages for a unique phrase which yielded no results through Google, and targeted it via a PPC campaign using Google AdWords to test the effects. There were no incoming links, and interlinking was kept to an absolute minimum.

It was soon indexed by Google, but not Yahoo!, and interestingly without the ‘www’ – something didn’t add up. We added Google Webmaster tools to the site to dig a bit deeper, but little seemed to change, apart from the fact that the sub-domain which we created in the second phase of testing had also been indexed.

We thought perhaps we had contaminated the process, but after much research our SEO team along with our man in development, John Rightford, figured out that the company we bought the domain from automatically submitted the URL for indexing. Bum.

The site has still only been indexed once, on February 24 this year, and it would seem that the case is closed: There are no direct SEO benefits from running a PPC campaign.