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That Whole SEO Thing is a Lie...

Posted by MadameX • 11/27/07 • Subscribe to this Discussion [RSS] • Report This Topic

Okay, I don't really believe that. But I currently have the #2 search result for "Ashley Tisdale High School Musical 2 Hairstyles", and I'm getting quite a lot of traffic these days on "I took a lickin from a chicken". These are, of course, not terms I've optimized for. In fact, I've never even written a post about I Took a Lickin from a Chicken...I don't even know what it is! I think it's an old game, but I've never even seen it...the search traffic is attributable to a COMMENT on one of my blogs. And I'm still ranked # 3 on the term "pay half stores" for a very brief post I wrote back in July.

I think Google needs to refine its discernment process.

Seriously, though--I'm usually the first to laugh at the crazy search terms that bring people to my blogs, but it would be useful to understand why it's happening, and thus far I haven't a clue.

Any thoughts?

User Comments

11/27/07

BlogBadly

You're getting traffic from "I took a lickin from a chicken"?

LUCKY!

Seriously, though, getting traffic from terms you haven't even thought of is cool and getting a lot is cooler. I'm getting a lot of hits from "penny stocks" and I wrote a short post on that too.

Same thing happens to me with the weird stuff sometimes, though. I got a hit from

"oh god no never money please give help" or something like that. I'm also the first term for "never forget the coffee shop on the street."

Random stuff like that is what makes things fun.

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11/27/07

robinj

I must be missing the boat or a really bad conversationalist lol I think people only find me because they dialed the wrong number

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11/27/07

suburbqueen

I've noticed I've been getting more google hits lately and some of them are from the comments on my blog too. It's fun (and sometimes scary) to see what people are searching for though.

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11/27/07

clioandme

My hits have been fairly unrandom, so from my point of view Google is doing its job.

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1. 11/27/07
  
  MadameX
  
  It would seem that mine are unrandom, too, in that the same terms consistently bring traffic. I have to wonder, though, what kind of factors are going into the determination when I'm getting, for instance, so much traffic on terms related to High School Musical. Yes, I have a post about High School Musical 2--or so it would appear to Google (the post is really about parenting). But there are entire extensive fan sites devoted to the show and the cast and the characters, not to mention official sites...how my writing blog, with one post about the show and one mention of Ashley Tisdale, ends up ranked is a mystery that's probably worth solving (for what we'd learn about intentional optimizing). So far, though, I haven't a clue.
11/27/07

MiLan

SEO thing is not lie. But Search-Algorithm of search engines makes it to be lie. Its a perennial fight between SEs and Search engine optimizer. Wherein SEs are trying to give best result for particular term. In order to get this a new front has opened up for them that is called spam-dexing, where few handful people try to manipulate SERP.

Your blog/website got top ranking because of two reason. First, it contains that specific word and qualifies all the condition that a website has to satisfy to be on top.

Second: There are very few competition for that keyword as that keyword is being searched a lot but optimizers are not aware of it.

[webreview-milan.blogspot.com]

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1. 11/27/07
  
  MadameX
  
  In part, I agree with your assessment, but there's not a lack of competition for some of these terms. For instance, on one of the High School Musical terms, I'm ranked above both the IMDB page for the movie and the Wikipedia page for the movie, as well as a review from Newsday, a story about the premiere of the movie on aolkids, and a Cosmogirl article that specifically uses the phrase (I did not use it directly).
11/27/07

emiltsch

You're getting click-thrus on "I took a lickin from a chicken" but not b/c anyone is searching that term - rather they're clicking on a link with that title somewhere. I'm sure the only people searching that term are you and a few people in here who have entered that phrase simply for a chuckle...

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1. 11/27/07
  
  MadameX
  
  Actually, it's easy to distinguish where traffic came from, and these hits are coming directly from search engines, primarily Google. I've never searched that phrase and am as surprised as you are that anyone else is. Here are a couple of examples from my stats:
  
  search.comcast.net/?q=i took a lickin from a chicken&cat=web&con=betaa&offset=10
  
  www.google.com/search?q=i took a lickin from a chicken&hl=en&rls=GGLR,GGLR:2005-40,GGLR:en&start=10&sa=N
2. 11/27/07
  
  MadameX
  
  Here's what keyword discovery has to say--certainly not a high traffic term, but there are a lot more people than I would have expected out there searching for this old game...
  
  took a lickin from a chicken 93
  took a lickin from a chicken game 12
  buy i took a lickin from a chicken 2
  took a lickin from a chicken for sale 2
11/28/07

ichaduma

Never really found anything like licking chicken what? And I can't see why that is relevant to SEO-is-a-lie problem. Isn't that supposed to be a good thing, MadameX?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Google "learns" from users' web history. It studies tendencies or something like that. I've tried googling from my own computer, then googling from a friend's, and it shows different results.

My hits mostly came from people googling for names, but the funniest ever is when I found there are google searches for my name and my ex together, I bet the person is looking for pictures or personal rants ..stuffs like that.

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1. 11/28/07
  
  MadameX
  
  Ichaduma, it would be a good thing if I knew what it was that made my pages show up for those terms and could apply that same approach to terms I WANT to be ranked on. I can't see that it's a particularly good (or bad) thing when it seems to be entirely random. My point, though, was that it's almost certainly NOT entirely random...so if I could figure out why I'm ranking on those terms, it would be very useful information.
  
  Google does remember your preferences and the sites you've chosen and show slightly different results based on that information, but I'm not sure how that applies in this case, since these are all different visitors.
11/28/07

wandadog13

Hi Madame X

I think it's supposed to be a mystery isn't it?? (lol). The High School Musical thing - perhaps it's the context in which you write about and mention it and this is somwhow tying in with other visitors and their search 'history'?

I watch the access log on Fabulous Photo Gifts some times and I see all manner of strange search phrases on google searches leading to the site but when I type them in, the website doesn't appear anywhere near the top so I assume it's down to my search history or people really are trawling back through the first 20 pages and beyond to arrive at our listing?

The best one was a photo cushion - we were going to offer one so I did the page andthe sitemap update etc - then a test print showed a flaw in the product so we decided to postpone it and it didn't go live, however someone had typed in photo cushions and we came top on first page of Google!

I agree if we could crack the 'code' we'd be wealthy seo's indeed.... I'm dreaming of a white xmas....

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11/28/07

wandadog13

I can hardly wait for high school musical 3 - hitting the cinemas in 2008! (oh joy - another 90 minutes munching popcorn trying not to look too bored and feigning excitememt for the sake of the youngsters you're taking!!!

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11/28/07

Wawaron

It is a funny subject... I have same questions for trafic by keywords on my blog... sometimes like this exemple : «when was the horse domesticated»

and I do not have a blog about farm, animal or other thing like that !! ;o)))

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11/28/07

thajmode

Its hard to think about this, but its true... google says they have like what? 20 b. searches a month only within the united states,,, lets say its 60 BILLION searches a month worldwide (asia duplicates north america in internet users)... It its possible to think that from 60,000,000,000 searches a few 1% is from unimaginable terms (thats 600 MILLION dumb searches a month)...

Think about it....

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11/28/07

henrychiah

i agreed

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11/28/07

pointlessbanter

Yeah I come up for some pretty random things. I don't get it. But you have to think that there might not be a lot of pages with those words phrased together so because you have a decent page rank they are coming up that high.

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1. 11/28/07
  
  MadameX
  
  That's what I thought originally, but for one of these terms (I haven't had time to really look at them, just followed the search link for a couple) I'm coming up above pages from Newsday, Wikipedia, Cosmogirl and aolkids that are directly relevant.