On searching for "caffeine", Google places itself at #2

[malik112]

Search for caffiene in Google and you will find Google itself placed at #2. Can any of your organic SEO research/analysis/study/experience be used to justify Google's presence here?

P.S. Even if it is about Caffiene Update what has Google.com got to do with it? A page from Google describing about Caffiene update is justifiable but why Google.com?

Just curious, how come...
Thanks

[tedster]

I'd guess two things:

1. Freshness - the algo has flagged this search term as QDF (Query Deserves Freshness) and the freshest backlinks will matter more for the fresh results that get blended into the SERP.

2. Backlink text - not necessarily anchor text, but text in near proximity to the backlink, and also in the page title, H1, subheads and the like.

[malik112]

Tedster,

you may be right with #1. But do you really believe in reason #2? If it were true why would emphasis be upon anchor text, more than anything else. I mean lets say I write an article on Christmas (H1/Subheads and the like) and in my author's bio insert a link to my SEO website with anchor text SEO... considering everything else to be equal/normal. do you think my website would start ranking for Christmas before it does for SEO?

Forget everything else, how does google justify its rank here for relevant result? When I am searching for caffiene why am I being shown Google.com? As a searcher who knows nothing about SEO, or Google or Caffiene update, where do I stand?

[tedster]

A searcher who doesn't know about the Caffeine update at Google probably wouldn't click on that particular result. But they probably WOULD click on one of the other first page results, those that are about other meanings and intentions for a search on [caffeine].

That's the idea behind blended search results - different interpretations of the query term do not "compete" directly against eash other, but rather 2 or 3 or 4 different types of results get blended into one page.

By the way, when I do this search at this moment, I see only one Google url in the results - that's www2.sandbox.google.com and it's at #6. The cached page says "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: caffeine".

So the #2 result you are seeing is not in full blown distribution. My guess would be it's testing the QDF factor for the [caffeine] search to see what the user response is.

[malik112]

Tedster,

Thanks for this info. Since blended results is something new for me, I have nothing to say further. do you have some 'suggested reading'(blogs/websites etc) where I could know more about the whole 'blended results' phenomenon?. Also about QDF...

Would be really appreciated.

thanks.

[tangor]

Wonder how many other substances in the real world google will attach to their products. :)

Taking nothing away from tedster's comments. Just curious!

(I'm off to look at the really cool substances I can keyword stuff in some of my pages!)

[santapaws]

and you just need to get half the seo community and much of the media to link back to your substance page with the right anchor text and for them all to do that in a short time frame. It will be interesting how long that result stands.
For a number 2 result, how many of the general public will understand that url?

[tedster]

...know more about the whole 'blended results' phenomenon?. Also about QDF.

This takes us far beyond discussing the SERP for [Caffeine], so I've split the follow-up discussion into a new thread at [webmasterworld.com...]

[aristotle]

I just did a search for "caffeine" at Caffeine itself (http://www2.sandbox.google.com).

It gave itself the number 15 position. There was also a newspaper article about it at position 6 under "News Results".

[steveb]

Not even in the top 30 here.

OP was probably logged in.

[Robert Charlton]

I saw it... in northern California, about 4 hours ago... not logged in, at #6 and then, after repeating the search several times and not flushing my cookies, at #8.

(Note that the misspelling caffiene never ranked for me, and that capitalization of the "C" apparently had no effect).

Google tends to start blended results in a high enough position that they'll get some clicks and then works on normalization. It's been something like 15-16 hours since the initial post, so it may be that this result didn't "earn" its position, and it drifted down.

It may also be that [caffeine] has a different significance in the afternoon than it does in the morning. It will be interesting to see if it goes Yo-Yo. ;)

[steveb]

Now I'm confused what the heck is being talked about and why.

Searching for [caffeine], www2.sandbox.google.com comes up at #5, which is about where I'd expect it to be given the hubub. google.com ranks nowhere in the top 100.

====

More interestingly, the Wikipedia entry at #1 has four minisite links which link to "#" sections of the page like
[en.wikipedia.org...]

[tedster]

Those page fragment links just started showing up in the results - see discussion here:
[webmasterworld.com...]