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

Demystifying The Radically Different Keyword Results Provided By
Overture and Wordtracker
...because your online success depends on getting accurate
keyword counts!
Part 2

- by Robin Nobles

(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.)