Who is seeing red widgets in Houston in 2008

[kidder]

For the search term "red widgets in Houston" 3 years ago you could bet a ton of eyeballs made that search and they all saw pretty much the same result. Fast forward to 2008 and that same search string produces about how many different sets of results would you estimate? If your trying to sell a product or a service on a city to city basis it's almost impossible to estimate organic search volumes from Google when 5 different machines return 5 different sets of results. And of course it's not just city to city, that was just an example. Just thinking back to the good ol days when a result was a result. Once you feed wiki and youtube we get a ? percentage of what is left over.

[tedster]

Yes, the game has definitely changed - and it will continue to change, we can bet on that. Being able to adapt to the "next big thing" that rolls and continue to benefit from the free search results is an important survival trait.

I'm seeing the wisdom of the long tail ever more clearly - it seems like a growing source of traffic. I find myself watching the server logs more and more, looking for those longer phrases that are already working, even though I didn;t intentionally target them.

[kidder]

Interesting you pull the long tail into the discussion, along with the shift in the way results are delivered I'm sure users searching habbits have changed as people learn to "extract" the results they are seeking but using longer but very specific strings. In another post I mentioned that we dropped a page for a primary keyword on one of our sites but it hardly dented the traffic due to the variety of search terms that deliver us traffic. Have tried launching a site from scratch of late? I'm sure most of us have and getting half decent volumes of organic traffic means you need lots of content unless your breaking new ground or find a niche untapped (what is that?)

[venti]

It seems there are few who understand the amount of traffic and money that these long tails can generate. Its takes a ton of great content, financial backing, work, authority, patience, a different strategy, etc... however the pay offs are huge! Many of the larger web sites on the web work get most of their traffic this way (having worked for a few). The long tail searches are also the most fun to work on, go figure.

[pageoneresults]

For the search term "red widgets in Houston" 3 years ago you could bet a ton of eyeballs made that search and they all saw pretty much the same result. Fast forward to 2008 and that same search string produces about how many different sets of results would you estimate?

I've seen results sets go from 250,000k to 12,250,000 in two years. Its a natural occurrence as Google's capacity grows and they index more of the web. Getting a top ten position these days is akin to hitting the lottery. There are still quite a few historical pages that have held on to their positions and look like they will continue to. :)

But, there are certain industries I like to watch and I'm seeing things that tell me Google may be experimenting with a randomizing routine in the top set of results. I watch one set of results regularly. In the past few months, there has been a pattern of jumping to position 4, then slowly sinking down to position 10, and then to page 2, position 11, then slowly sinking to position 14 and bam, back to position 4 only to start the same process again. Don't know if anyone else is experiencing that but I've noticed that one pattern in one particular instance.

In regards to long tail...

Isn't it the long tail searches though that come the easiest and most naturally? And, as the average Internet surfer becomes more savvy to advanced search queries the long tail will continue to grow and prosper, I think its a given.

From my perspective, you shouldn't have to give much thought to the long tail side of things. Its one of those "effects" that "is" going to happen no matter what. If your content is well written, structured, etc. the targeted long tail searches typically cometh! It seems that the more natural the writing style, the easier it is to obtain long tail. You can't force something like that, or can you?

[tedster]

If your content is well written, structured, etc. the targeted long tail searches typically cometh! It seems that the more natural the writing style, the easier it is to obtain long tail. You can't force something like that, or can you?

You just described my formula - or at least the beginning of it. What I do next is watch the server logs and see what keyword traffic I'm collecting. If a phrase that's ranking on page 2 starts to show decent search traffic, I look for ways to work with that longer phrase and get it to rank on page 1.

[kidder]

I spend a good deal of time back tracking referer URL's from my tracker, I also have exit click tracking so it shows me how they arrive and how they leave. The single thing that surprises me the most is when we have a top 3 ranking for a competitive term and what I would consider a high volume term but the traffic seems to be "throttled" down in some way. Often Google refers take me back to page 1 and I don't see my URL in the results so I need to start scrolling pages to find it, I expect these "events" are related. That is to say the top results for a given keyword are to many and varied depending on a number of factors from user activity, geo location to high tides, wind speed and direction....

[tedster]

Another complication that several threads here have recently mentioned in addition to geo-located results. Google in some cases is working with time-varied results. This is somewhat obvious when it comes to the seasons, but how about weekday/weekend? Or daytime/evening/late-night? On some searches, this seems to be the case.

[Propools]

I've noticed that the search results which I thought were #1, are actually #2.
If there are products listed in Google Shopping/Base which match the search query, the summation of the three "Shopping Results" are actually considered position #1, at least in FF w/ my add-ons.

It's not like some shocking revelation but more one of those "hmmm, imagine that" kind of things. We're not SEOing against Google too, are we? ;)

No, we're not really. We're SEOing against other pages AND those products listed in the Google Products Arena.

[edited by: tedster at 1:54 pm (utc) on May 20, 2008]
[edit reason] moved from another loction [/edit]

[kidder]

I think there is a type of "threshold" if you like to call it that. Sites will only rank for certain % of the actual search volume until they meet the age or trust requirements of the particular vertical. Am I stating the obvious here?

[tedster]

It may not be age and trust also, but also proven performance no matter how fast or gradual that is achieved. Google Search has one driving purpose - the satisfaction of its end user. Everything else is supportive to that drive.

[kidder]

Yes hence my thread about the video clips, just because they own it does not mean they need to ram it down our flat screens, that is a different set of rules right there. Anyway the real question I have been trying to get my head around for months is how you can rank top 3 for a busy search term and still get little traffic in return. A ranking I see today is not what the guy next door is seeing but at some point you may become the most relevant result to the majority. May.