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A SERP of One's Own
July 05, 2006
With apologies to Virginia Woolf, a bit of SEO potpourri today, revisiting topics both old and recent.
Google Finally Knows Us. One of Tom's pet peeves has always (and I mean always) been that a Google search for [seo speedwagon] brought up Google's famous "did you mean...?" line, suggesting a typo. (Apparently, there's a band with a similar name.)
Finally, the confusion seems to be over; a query for [seo speedwagon] gives the user just that - like it or not.
Of course it's impossible to accurately define the "tipping point" at which Google decides that a query no longer needs spell-check assistance, but it's likely a combination of the following:
- Age of the subdomain that lists the query term
- Number of backlinks and the anchor text used
- Number of times a specific phrase is searched for, as measured by the engine
- Sheer number of times the phrase exists on the Web
- A comment from the CEO's mother
Now that the Speedwagon issue is resolved, I'll leave it to Tom to sort out his similar issues with Tom Huston.
Hardly Therapeutic. I'm a little surprised that no one has picked up on Sean's find from last week - namely that Google, in a mid-SERP "see also" result, suggests that the user try Yahoo when searching for [therapy products]:
An inside joke? Perhaps. Regardless, we'll not speculate as to why Sean was seeking therapy products in the first place, but instead hope that he found relevant results.
All posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at July 5, 2006 11:44 PM
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» The New Ego Search: "Did You Mean" Results in Google Search from Search Engine Roundtable
Ego searching is when people want to rank well for their names, such as being number #6 for barry when the title and the content on the page doesn't have the words on the page. But there is a... [Read More]
Tracked on July 6, 2006 09:50 AM
Comments
There is hope for you Tom.
It wasn't long ago that when doing a search for my name, Google finally stopped suggesting: Did you mean Dough Assburn?
Posted by: Doug at July 6, 2006 09:44 AM
So, you guys were finally able to break out of the shadows of REO Speedwagon... congratulations!
I mean seriously... how Google could ever confuse the popularity of some band with that of SEO Speedwagon's is beyond me. There should have been no doubt at Google that when search users search "anything + speedwagon" their indeed looking for this Blog.
Posted by: Karl Ribas at July 6, 2006 11:47 AM
Thanks Karl. Of course we must bow in deference to the ORIGINAL Speedwagon - the auto designed by Ransom Olds in the early 1900s, which inspired our logo above. To do otherwise would be the highest form of infidelity.
Posted by: Erik Dafforn at July 6, 2006 01:24 PM
I knew it wouldn't be long before we were riding the storm out.
Posted by: Doug at July 7, 2006 01:26 AM
Hi all,
It would be great help to understand how google or any other search engine work when it find some Spelling mistakes in keywords . But still these smart engines can know what word we want to search, But how does it recognize the keyword we want. Can anybody mention about:
1) How these Search Engine works
2) Any Algorithms codes are most welcome
3) Obviously the logic behind how to search efficiently and effectively if the keyword is misspelled.
thanking you!
regards
jeevan
Posted by: jeevan at September 22, 2006 04:49 PM
A recent post on the Digital Point forums reminded me of this blog post.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=274866
I notice you don't receive suggestions for "REO Speedwagon" anymore - and would be interested in finding out why you think that is.
I've added my hypotheses here:
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=274866#5
Which one do you think is the most likely? (Or do you think there was another cause?)
Brent
Posted by: Brent Hodgson at March 21, 2007 09:51 AM
Perhaps for this article you should do one of:
- add spaces between REO,
- alter the HTML for REO,
- remove the article.
The worse situation for you would be for high ranking pages to refer to this post using REO as a keyword...
Cheers
Posted by: Morris Johns at September 23, 2008 04:45 PM