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

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

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

Jhonny Papas is the co-author of http://www.Traffic-Engine.NET
(http://www.Traffic-Engine.NET) and eCommerce Analyst.