What external third parties have an impact. On the one hand, as people reported this story, starting with the Guardian which first reported on it and followed by others, this news gained traction. This is natural for Google and Bing. Recent content, especially from news sites, is often rewarded in the short term and ranks well. The Guardian writer who tracked this issue also did a follow-up story on buying an ad against these results,
to skip over the opt-out site via paid listings. However, she is not the only one. The aforementioned American Holocaust Memorial Museum has also bought ads or someone buys them for the museum, as you can see in my first example above. This ad definitely fax number list does NOT help USHMM's free listing rank better. Google strongly denies that ads influence rankings in this way, and there has never been any serious
evidence that it has any impact. However, having the ad there might make more people realize that the museum should be listed first naturally, for free, and start linking to it. An increase in links, especially from authority sites and with the right kind of textual context, could have an impact. The right links, in the right way, can actually act as votes to improve rankings. As for this new site that pops up, it was built by an