GoTo KW suggestion tool

crazy results

[tedster]

Sometimes the GoTo suggestion tool [inventory.go2.com] gives results I can't fathom.

For instance, an entry of "people" shows 239 GoTo searches last month for this phrase:

"start being real stop being polite story of seven people picked new orleans"

Now, what's up with that?

[Brett_Tabke]

Three possibilities:

Full question/natural language searching
Probably what you are seeing is the fact that many people are using full questions. When you combine that with the huge amount of keyword spidering that is now going on - what happens, is people spider the other keyword spies and they get a great deal of bogus data. Ask Jeeves has one of the keyword spies and 'keyword' data from it is almost useless some times. Put that all together in a technological soup mix, between the spies and spiders, and suddenly and plain goofy stuff comes to the top of keyword search lists.

Keyword list obfuscation
There is also the possibility that Goto is obfuscating a few kw reports on purpose. One of the old tricks at Yahoo, was to poison the internal keyword list in order to find any leaks. If the list would pop up on site XYZ, they knew they could find it and back track it due to the goof poison keywords.

Keyword spamming
There is also a great deal of keyword search spamming going on with many of the engines. Alta is the current worst victim. Ever notice those 'related searches' words at the top of most of the single keyword or popular searches? Those are drawn from Alta's internal top keyword lists. By running a spider and spamming the search routines with your chosen keywords that you rank high under, you can get alta to put your favorite search on those top search words list. People click on the 'related searches' keyword and your site pops up in the top ten. Tricky huh?

[tedster]

Thanks for those possibilities, Brett. I would never have dreamed up such going's on.

Somtimes I think that I am not nearly devious enough for this game!

[metaman]

Wow Brett! That certainly is tricky. I wish I could think up strategies like that on my own...

I remember a couple months back the phrase "legitimate work at home internet job" had been searched on something like 1200 times in the month, now it's at about 80.That's not as far-fetched as your example tedster but I can't imagine it's accurate. Probably a spider.. like you said Brett.

You would think people would type in "work at home internet job" just a little bit more than with "legitimate" stuck in there, but according to Goto it's searched on only about half as many times.

Anyway,I love the goto keyword research tool. . .

[Brett_Tabke]

I like the Goto tool too. It is good to spark ideas. Quite frankly, I think some of the best keyword phrases to focus on are often found at the bottoms of lists. It is hard to hit the top keywords, but if you focus on 10-20 phrases with one phrase per page, you can pull traffic from that broad category. One of the big phenomons still occuring is webmasters are trying to focus on a handful of top keywords and not going for the minor phrases. A site of ours pulled 400 referrals out of google.yahoo yester day - of that, the biggest keyword referer had 3 hits (that's a lot of keywords to pull from - but it is great traffic and it survives the up/downs in the se's).

[seth_wilde]

"start being real stop being polite story of seven people picked new orleans"

I feel silly for knowing this, But that's one of the opening lines for MTV's show The Real World (with a couple words missing). I don't think that that justifies it being searched for 239 times, infact it sounds like an abvious case of spamming, but I thought I'd let you know where it came from.

[Brett_Tabke]

See there, a fourth possibility. Probably a direct quote with stop words removed? Nice work Seth.