Discover YOUR TRUE Competition &start=990

Hi John,

Where exactly do we place the &start=990? I did a test and no changes but maybe I am doing it the wrong way.

I also watched a video talking about this. When I tried what you suggest, it returned 255 results for "warrior forum". Now I am confused about that, which one is true. There may not be 149,000 pages having the keyword "warrior forum" on them, but I am sure there are a lot more than 255 or 660. So, can we rely on this?

Hi Fernando

Do your search in google and once you get your result add the &start990 to the end of the google url in the browser.

John

You don't need to add it to the end, just change the URL, ie.

"start=" ... is already in that URL. I seem to get up to Page 29 in the search, and then no more results.

So where is the 149,000 pages Google says there is? Why does it stop at Page 29?

:rolleyes:

Great point John ... but even though we are after a top 10 spot surley it is relevant to know how many other people are optimising for it as well?

o.k. I've been playing with this, lost 20 min and what is interesting, it will lower the competing pages. So first in quotes says, 2200 add the code says, it will say 226. for one case 25 google pages. But as soon as you click on the google page number (for the results at the bottom) it will take you back to 2200?

Google returns no more than 1,000 results for any search. Therefore, purely looking at a number of "competitors" is mostly a useless exercise when it comes to SEO. Who cares if there are 10,000 pages indexed by Google or 10,000,000 pages indexed by Google for a particular keyword? That number is NOT relevant to whether or not you can rank for a particular keyword phrase.

As I've taught all of my SEO students for a long, long time: the "competition" you need to look at is the first page of Google results.

Of course those who teach poor or lazy SEO or like to tout: "See? My page is ranked #2 out of 41,000,000 results! That must PROVE that I'm good at SEO". Uh, no, sorry. But I guess it does sound better than saying: "See? My page is ranked #2 out of 1,000 because Google will only return 1,000 results anyway!"

Your "competition" must be judged on STRENGTH and not QUANTITY. Period.

Thanks for posting that, John. I've seen quite a few different takes on the CTR for top Google results. However, many are inaccurate and don't take into account two important factors: search abandonment rate AND the fact that 14% of Google clicks are on Adwords ads. That leaves less than 86% of clicks available for organic search results, and the list above ads up to more than 86%.

some people spend way too much time on trying to figure out who their competition is and what their competition is doing that is actually effects their business...

I personally could'nt care less what my competition stats are, where they are advertising, what results they are getting, and etc .... If I spent all that time on researching my competition I would never make any money and my business would suffer. I care about what "my" stats are, where "my" traffic comes from, what "my" sales volume is and etc ...

I find it funny sometimes how so many people worry about what the competition is doing and they could be doing something productive with their own site to earn money. There are many that worry about what alexa, compete, and other stat websites say... Frankly who cares what they say because their stats are so wrong that it is funny. It is impossible for any of their stats to be correct unless they have a direct link and access to your server...

I have seen many pull up these sites like cubestat.com and sit there and gaze over the incorrect stats thinking they are correct. Well, use the brain god gave you.. These sites can not tell me what my site is worth and they certainly can not tell me what ad revnue my site could be making.

Great example and this is not self promotion but I am going to prove a point. AP I build 100% from the ground up, it was built and "hand" coded from scratch. If a client was to hire me to build this site I would have charged no less than $30,000 and if I was going to sell it right now I would not sell it for no less than $100,000. You see these sites can not say what my site is worth because they are not the ones that built it, they are not the ones that coded the thing.

People spend far too much time wondering what their competition does. Yeah I think we all are guilty of looking up this keyword or that keyword and nothing wrong with that at all... Wasting time and checking every site and every software out there just to ffind out about your competition I think there is something wrong with that because you could have spent that time make improvements on your site or making sales..

This is just my opinion though, for whatever it's worth... Maybe a site like cubestat or alexa could tell me what my opinion is worth....

James