Demystifying The Radically Different Keyword Results Provided By Overture and Wordtracker, Part 2

by: Nandang S Nugraha | Total views: 25 | Word Count: 1025 | View PDF | Print View

 by: Robin Nobles

...because your online success depends on getting accurate keyword counts! (Continued from Part 1. Contact Robin@SearchEngineWorkshops.com for the complete article.)

Reason #2 - Duplicate Searches

As
you most certainly must know, Overture's strength as a viable
advertising medium for online businesses lies in the fact they are
provide results to "tens of thousands of Web sites" which include
AltaVista, Yahoo, MSN Search, HotBot, and AllTheWeb just to name a few.
They claim to reach more than 80% of active U.S. Internet users.

Potentially,
this is great for advertisers! ...yet this very same structure is what
so greatly contributes to the artificial skew leading to extremely
over-inflated reporting of keyword queries.

According to
Overture itself, statistics on searches in any previous month are
compiled from Overture's partner search engines. To further understand
how partnering tends to facilitate skewed query counts, let's examine
what happens when a visitor conducts a search at AltaVista.

What's
actually happening is that two searches are being conducted at one time
- one at AltaVista, and another that lists the SPONSORED MATCHES
supplied by Overture's pay-per-click engine.

Although it
is next to impossible to know the exact figures, suffice it to say that
a single human often generates multiple queries when doing a single
search as calculated by Overture's STST. In some cases that same human
could even generate additional "hits" for a given keyword simply by
conducting the same search again on a different engine if such engine
is also an Overture partner.

For instance, searching Yahoo, then searching again on MSN, then searching again on AltaVista, then again on AllTheWeb.com
would tally at least five "hits" for the selected search term. In
comparison, if Overture (like Google, for instance) counted only the
searches that were done "on-site," such duplicate searches would not be
counted and their search query numbers would be far more accurate.

This
scenario, combined with the myriad artificial duplicate searches
conducted by the various softwares (explained above), severely pumps up
the number of queries for virtually every legitimate search term
imaginable.

Reason #3 - Plurals and Singulars

Remember
our STST example (above) regarding the 180,468 "searches" for the term
"keyword"? Well, another factor to consider is that Overture's STST
combines both the plural term (keywords) and the singular (keyword) in
compiling that number.

And, Overture's STST not only
combines the plural and singular versions of "keywords," they also
combine upper and lower case searches as well. Obviously, these two
factors also exert an upward effect on the query count tabulations.

Third: Examining The Alternatives.

So now the obvious question - Is there a "better" way to tabulate search term query counts? ...let's examine the alternatives.

Meta-engines - a better way to accurately tabulate queries.

Obviously
we'd like to eliminate artificial and duplicate searches from our
tabulations, and fortunately there is a way to do so. The solution is
Meta-engines.

Composite (Meta) engines, like Metacrawler
and Dogpile, are search engines that query all the major engines
simultaneously. One of the key differences is that the ratio of human
queries to automated queries for a meta-engine is much higher than for
a major search engine. That's because it doesn't make sense for anyone
to point their auto-bots at meta-engines.

Position
monitoring, bid-optimizing, popularity checks, etc., are typically
conducted directly at the search engines themselves. It would be
pointless to conduct such automated queries on a meta- engine because
meta-engines do not "add-url's" nor do they offer pay-per-click
options. They are simply a search engine that queries other search
engines. And, since there is no "metacrawler" of meta-engines, the
search query counts are unlikely to be artificially skewed by such
artificial searches.

Furthermore, duplicate searches are
eliminated because the query counts are being tabulated from a single
source instead of combining results from myriad partners.

Therefore,
query counts taken from meta-engines are far, far more representative
of the number of searches conducted by actual people - but even this is
not yet a perfect solution due to a relatively obscure form of keyword
spam.

Keyword spam (in this case not to be confused with
word stuffing or repeating keywords within a Web page) refers to the
practice of using cgi-scripting to manipulate the Metaspy metacrawler
voyeur to artificially promote certain products or services.

By
entering a flow of terms or phrases at predetermined intervals, such
spammers hope to inflate the importance and significance of certain
search terms thereby artificially increasing the value of such terms
related to their products.

In a perfect world,
adjustments should be made to filter out this flavor of spam. In a
minute we'll share with you how such filtering is done but first, let's
address the issue of combining plurals with singulars and upper with
lower-case searches.

Plural, singular, upper, and
lower-case searches represent a decision-point for search engine
optimizers because sometimes it's good to combine the search query
numbers while other times it isn't.

For instance the
search terms "keyword and keywords," whether singular, plural, or in
upper or lower-case, are similar enough in meaning that they could
arguably be combined into one search query number.

However,
the search terms "tap, taps, Tap, and TAP" can have entirely different
meanings. Take a look at the results for the search term "tap" on
Overture. The following references were all found within the top ten
sponsored listings:

• Machine threading taps,

• Tap / Rap support software

• Beer taps

• Tap Dancing

• TAP A Stock

• TAP Terminal Phone Numbers

Note
that none of the above has any relation to the others! Obviously if we
are selling any of these items, we'd want more specificity regarding
the search queries than the simple 10,485 searches that STST reports
were conducted in the past 30 days.

The example above
illustrates the importance of obtaining search query tabulations for
each version of a selected keyword independently of the other.

After
all, it's easy to manually combine the numbers while it's impossible to
break them out into their own categories once they've been compressed
by Overture's STST into a single search term regardless of potentially
different meanings.

(Continued in Part 3. Contact Robin@SearchEngineWorkshops.com for the complete article.)

About the Author

Robin Nobles is Co-Director of Training for Search Engine Workshops (http://www.searchengineworkshops.com). She has trained several thousand people in her hands-on 2-5 day optimization and marketing workshops at locations across the globe and her online SEO courses (http://www.onlinewebtraining.com). Robin is also a member of Wordtracker's special technical support team (http://www.wordtracker.com/moreinfo.html), and she partners with John Alexander whose eBook, Wordtracker Magic (http://www.wordtracker-magic.com), offers unique strategies for applying the Wordtracker service to generate profits for online marketers.

First published in Planet Ocean News. (http://www.searchenginehelp.com/moreinfo/)

Copyright 2004 Robin Nobles. All Right Reserved.

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