Google visitors from pages 7 on back

[victorP]

Lately I have noticed in my stats many ref urls from google where the visitor has has gone back through 7+ pages in order to find my site.

They really didn't find anything to captivate their attention in the first six pages?

[tedster]

If there's more than 1 (or just maybe 2) on the same keyword, my guess would be that some Google datacenters are showing those urls in a much higher position, but the dc you are seeing shows them on page 7. Also, there's a possibility of personalized or geolocated results kicking in in some way.

[ronburk]

I didn't understand your comment, tedster. I mean, no matter how many differences between data centers exist, if the request came in from page 7, that implies somebody dug that deep to get that result on that particular data center, right?

I guess I'm assuming his stats package is reporting the page number as encoded in the actual Google request. If it instead is using some kind of independent "keyword ranking" query to decide, then I guess I do see your point.

If they're really digging down 7 pages to get to you, I would try real hard to figure what it is they want that they didn't get in the first 6 pages -- could be an opportunity.

[tedster]

I might have been making a wrong assumption here - how do you know that a click came from page 7?

[sandpetra]

If you have a blog it may have shown up high on Google Blog search?

[Bewenched]

I've noticed this as well ... it's almost as if the first few pages did not give the end user the information they were looking for so they dug deeper to find us. usually those convert very well.

Same thing with ads .. we've found that ads 2 and sometimes 3 pages back convert better as well.

[MarkWolk]

Nothing particularly unusual, I think. I often search for things difficult to find and look at 20+ pages each time.

[StickyNote]

I often see Google queries in my logfiles with a starting indexes of from 300 to 900.

In most cases these deep searches are not customers intent on finding the perfect widget, but rather some script harvesting phone numbers and emails for particular keywords.

[Lexur]

I think too they are spam tools harvesting mainly email addresses regarding a certain keyword to "personalize" spam messages.

[victorP]

hmmm, good point. I didn't think about the email harvesters, ect.

to answer your question, I am looking in my stats. There it has the exact url that the "visitor" clicked from to get to my page.

When I click the same url, it brings me to that page (often 7 or 8) in the google index.

[watercrazed]

to answer your question, I am looking in my stats. There it has the exact url that the "visitor" clicked from to get to my page.

When I click the same url, it brings me to that page (often 7 or 8) in the google index.

Then tedster comment applies, what you see on googles 7th page may be on someone else 1st or 2nd page for a varity of reasons.

Back when google was dancing on a semi predicable basis it was not as common as now, then once the dance was over google.com was pretty monolithic, it is no longer. regionalization, personalization, everflux and more contribute to different people seeing the same search phase generating different result sets.

[StickyNote]

I believe what victorP was using to base the page count was the referring URL and query from G00gle which would look something like:

g00gle.com/search?q=blue+widget&start=10

Where 'start=n' is the starting result on the current search page. Since the default behavior of Google search is to display 10 results per page, one can assume that start=70 is usually the 7th page of search results. And would give results 71-80.

Logfile analytics will often give a link to referring URLs,?query included.

Some people with very little social life, like myself, up the results per page to 100 in their preferences. In that case start=100 would be the second page of 100 results.

Although the results can vary due to personalized search etc, usually when I grab the referring URL from a recent logfile, and display the results in a browser, I see pretty much what the original surfer saw. My site is almost always in the same 10 results, be it page one or page 20. I do find getting results similar to the original surfer is reduced as more days pass.

[Lexur]

Some people with very little social life, like myself, up the results per page to 100 in their preferences.

Gosh!

I always felt that setting my results per page to 100 was a sign of know how. Should I now review my social life?

[StickyNote]

review my social life?

Sorry, that should have been worded "anti-socials like myself, and people with 'know how'"