What is wrong with google?

[questionman]

Hello there everybody,it's questionman

i have a question for all of you.

Just recently, i was doing a keyword research,in other words, searching for keyword competition.

I found a odd thing while doing my research.
Normally when we place the double quotes on both ends of a keyword, you should see a change in the result.
But,that is not the case anymore,now you don't see a change,your results stays the same.

what's up with that,why is Google torturing me so much.

Are you people having the same problem?
If not,what is the best solution to this?
Is there a way of returning back to the old good Google?because i am starting to hate this evil new Google


Please,i need some advice how can i analyze my keyword competition.
Based on my understanding(if it's right).the Google keyword tool competition bar is for Ad words.

please leave your comments.

[Alexander Simons]

Allintitle still works. Write in google:
allintitle: keyword and you could get to know the competion.

[questionman]

Thank you Alexander the great,We should conquer Google one day.
I will check it out.

[Alexander Simons]

Originally Posted by questionman

Thank you Alexander the great,We should conquer Google one day.
I will check it out.

Always glad to help, remember that allintitle shows less competion than double quotes.
Allintitle is how many sites that have the keyword in their title not in their content that double quotes shows.
And also remember to always analyse the top results before choosing a keyword, you want to see low pr sites with not too many backlinks on the first page, for me analysing the top results is far more inportant than allintitle and quotes.

[questionman]

i see now,well,i'll use traffictravis to analyze the top 10 sites,to see how they have optimize their page on that keyword.(on page optimization) and see how difficult it is to rank on number one.
please leave more advice,if you have more.

[paulgl]

All this nonsense, of course, just propogates the long standing
tradition of looking for a site to create based on some magic
keyword or phrase. Not just opening a site for the love of it,
because you have knowledge of it, or even an interest in it.

What kind of site does this lead to? A site created for nothing
but monetization, probably adsense?

Has anyone not learned a thing over the summer so far? What
is google trying to get rid of and targeting?

Oh I know. You can always take a MFA site and make it "look
good" Well, I for one have always been against putting lipstick
on a pig. Google is beginning to wipe the lipstick off anyway.

What's wrong with google? More like, What's wrong with people?

Paul

[dburk]

Originally Posted by Alexander Simons

Always glad to help, remember that allintitle shows less competion than double quotes.
Allintitle is how many sites that have the keyword in their title not in their content that double quotes shows.
And also remember to always analyse the top results before choosing a keyword, you want to see low pr sites with not too many backlinks on the first page, for me analysing the top results is far more inportant than allintitle and quotes.

Hi Alexander,

Please allow me to clarify a few points that you made.

The allintitle: search operator only shows part of the competition, the part that included that keyword in the webpage title. And it is not showing you "how many sites that have the keyword in their title", it is showing how many "pages" with the keyword in the title. You will often find hundreds or even thousands of pages from just a handful of websites.

I agree with you, the allintitle search operator results are not very important in analyzing competition. Since the allintitle search operator does not show you all of competing pages, and gives you no reliable indication of the strength of your competition, it isn't all that useful.

I would suggest the allinanchor: search operator to be a much more useful technique for analyzing your competition. It shows you results sorted by how much promotional effort was implemented for each competing page. If you are a competent SEO practitioner then you know that you can at least equal the best on-page SEO, and that leaves off-page SEO on promotional link building efforts as the only significant metric for analyzing any serious competition for SERP ranking.

Technically speaking, their isn't any such thing as "low PR sites". PR isn't assigned to "sites", it is assigned to individual pages. Furthermore, SERP rankings aren't based on PR, they are based on relevancy signals. Looking at the PR of pages in the SERP is not a reliable indicator of strength of competition. PR is a useful metric when analyzing backlink strength, but not for SERP listings.

[simonbuzz]

Just Checked and I don't see any problem...

[BAcheson]

guys....this is the most accurate way of determining competition:

intitle:"keyword" AND inanchor:"keyword"

The 2 methods above are only half accurate.

[dburk]

Originally Posted by BAcheson

guys....this is the most accurate way of determining competition:

intitle:"keyword" AND inanchor:"keyword"

The 2 methods above are only half accurate.

Hi BAcheson,

Both of those methods (intitle and inanchor) are inaccurate with the exception of keywords with a single word. Using those operators with keyword phrases (that contain more than one word) would be inaccurate since those operators will return pages that aren't optimized for the term being searched. Using the allintitle: and the allinanchor: operators provide far more precise results for multi-word keywords.

[BAcheson]

Hey Don. If i'm trying to optimize for something like "green lawn gnomes", allintitle does not give me the information I need. I want to know how many other pages use that exact phrase in that exact order.

intitle:"green lawn gnomes" AND inanchor:"green lawn gnomes" shows me how many pages are using that exact phrase in the title and also have links pointing at them with that exact phrase in the anchor text.

Using allintitle matches pages with titles like:
green house supply centre - we also sell gnomes to put on your lawn

Not to mention you cannot chain allintitle with allinanchor:
allintitle:lawn gnomes AND allinanchor:lawn gnomes = 0 results
intitle:"lawn gnomes" AND inanchor:"lawn gnomes" = 11,600 results

[dburk]

Originally Posted by BAcheson

Hey Don. If i'm trying to optimize for something like "green lawn gnomes", allintitle does not give me the information I need. I want to know how many other pages use that exact phrase in that exact order.

intitle:"green lawn gnomes" AND inanchor:"green lawn gnomes" shows me how many pages are using that exact phrase in the title and also have links pointing at them with that exact phrase in the anchor text.

Using allintitle matches pages with titles like:
green house supply centre - we also sell gnomes to put on your lawn

Not to mention you cannot chain allintitle with allinanchor:
allintitle:lawn gnomes AND allinanchor:lawn gnomes = 0 results
intitle:"lawn gnomes" AND inanchor:"lawn gnomes" = 11,600 results

Hi BAcheson,

Actually you can chain them using the OR operator. But you need to realize I did not mean to infer that they should be chained, because they are showing very different information when chained. When you use those two operators together you are filtering for a very specific optimization technique, and while it is a useful metric, it is limited to pages that use that specific on-page optimization technique. It is really only useful when analyzing websites rather than individual page ranking.

While the allinanchor: operator, used without chaining, shows you pages sorted in order of off-page optimization efforts. When competing with other pages for rankings, your on-page optimization efforts should be a given, there is no great need to analyze what you know you can equal or beat. It is the off-page efforts that tend to be the costliest and that is where you should focus your analysis.

The allinanchor: operator allows you focus on off-page optimization efforts exclusively. You can then drill down into the stats for the individual pages that will be your primary competition. The main thing you need to know is how much is it going to cost you get a first page listing. You need to understand how much promotional effort will be required to make it and for that you must focus on the off-page efforts of your competition.

In the famous words of Seth Godin:

Just because something is easy to measure doesn't mean it's important.

[BAcheson]

Originally Posted by dburk

Hi BAcheson,

Actually you can chain them using the OR operator. But you need to realize I did not mean to infer that they should be chained, because they are showing very different information when chained. When you use those two operators together you are filtering for a very specific optimization technique, and while it is a useful metric, it is limited to pages that use that specific on-page optimization technique. It is really only useful when analyzing websites rather than individual page ranking.

While the allinanchor: operator, used without chaining, shows you pages sorted in order of off-page optimization efforts. When competing with other pages for rankings, your on-page optimization efforts should be a given, there is no great need to analyze what you know you can equal or beat. It is the off-page efforts that tend to be the costliest and that is where you should focus your analysis.

The allinanchor: operator allows you focus on off-page optimization efforts exclusively. You can then drill down into the stats for the individual pages that will be your primary competition. The main thing you need to know is how much is it going to cost you get a first page listing. You need to understand how much promotional effort will be required to make it and for that you must focus on the off-page efforts of your competition.

In the famous words of Seth Godin:

Using the OR operator is not chaining. Chaining only occurs if the results of the first operator are then used to complete the second operator(think method chaining if you have any development experience); an "OR" is simply a join/union.

I was not questioning your strategies. My issue was the allin operator usage. The allin operators are broad matching. Knowing how many other pages have links containing the individual words in any order is not a very informative stat.

obviously, exact match anchor text is important. Your method doesn't care if any of these pages have links w/ exact match anchor text. They are all treated equal no matter if it's a phrase or broad match.

Your thoughts?

[dburk]

Originally Posted by BAcheson

Using the OR operator is not chaining. Chaining only occurs if the results of the first operator are then used to complete the second operator(think method chaining if you have any development experience); an "OR" is simply a join/union.

I was not questioning your strategies. My issue was the allin operator usage. The allin operators are broad matching. Knowing how many other pages have links containing the individual words in any order is not a very informative stat.

obviously, exact match anchor text is important. Your method doesn't care if any of these pages have links w/ exact match anchor text. They are all treated equal no matter if it's a phrase or broad match.

Your thoughts?

Hi BAcheson,

Most searches by users are not phrase searches, therefore the keywords to optimize for are the regular searches (without quotes). While using exact keywords for anchor text is advisable, it isn't absolutely necessary for ranking in SERP.

There are many top ranked search results that do not have the exact keyword phrase in the page title and you can easily be outranked by pages that do not use the exact keyword term in page titles or anchor text of inbound links. If you do a series of random searches you may note that the top results include all of the words in your query, but not necessarily together in the exact phrase. Using the quotes will filter out all but the pages that use that exact phrase, with no word(s) between or in a different order.

So if you want to pull results that include all pages that will be returned by a regular search query (without quotes) you need to use the allintitle without quotes around your keyword, otherwise you are filtering many pages that will be in the top rankings for regular searches.

Knowing that, how do you discover where a page ranks based strictly on off-site optimization?

If it is a single word keyword the inanchor: operator will pull the correct data, however if you are checking a multi-word keyword you must use the allinanchor: operator. That is because the inanchor: used with a multi-word keyword will pull results with the first word of the keyword in the anchor and the remaining words any where on the page. So the allinanchor must be used to pull the same results that SERPs are based on.

You cannot use the inanchor:, with a muti-word keyword in quotes, to pull the same data that represents the rankings based on regular searches. Instead it pulls data based strictly on phrase searches. If you want to see who has the best optimization for a regular search, you have to leave those quotes out, otherwise you are filtering many of your toughest competitors and not getting a true picture.