Monday Morning SEO Tip – Google Exaggerates
Here’s a little tip for you, for when you’re doing market research of if someone is trying to tell you how fantastic they or their product is for search engine rankings.
Haven’t we all heard people say, my ABC SEO killer product is so great, “I’m the number one site in Google for the term blankety blank out of 1,630,000,000 possible results”?
Here’s how to debunk this one, preferably in the face of the braggart.
- Make sure your Google results settings (go to advanced settings) are set to display 100 results per page.
- Enter your term in the search box.
- Press Enter
- Google will display: “Results 1 – 100 of about 1,630,000,000 for internet business.”
- Now scroll to the bottom of the page, and where the page counter is click on the number 10 link.
- Google will now display: “Results 901 – 930 of about 1,630,000,000 for internet business.”
That’s it, not 1.6 billion, but actually Google only considers there to be 930 results for the term internet business. Scroll down to the bottom of the page again, and notice that there are no numbers or “next” after 10.
It doesn’t mean that it is easy to rank in the top 10 for internet business, but just to take a little air out the balloon of the SEO hype-sters.
Another way to use this information is in market research. You will get a much more accurate picture of the amount of effort required to compete in a market by looking at the “real” number of results rather than the giant inflated numbers.
Where do the BIG numbers come from?
In the earlier days of search, when Google and AltaVista were going head to head there was a “my penis is bigger than yours” type competition based on the number of pages each search engine was indexing. The numbers eventually became so silly that they were dropped from the home pages of the search engines, but I suspect these silly “…of 1,600,000,000 results” are a throw-back to that testosterone war.
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Comments ( 12 )
stas bekman added these pithy words on Sep 24 07 at 1:59 pmAFAIK, Google shows only the first 1000 hits. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t 1,630,000,000 hits for internet business in its database.
Moreover, searching for internet business is searching for any documents containing either of the words anywhere in the document.
Searching for “internet business” gives *only* 2M hits.
http://www.google.ca/search?num=50&hl=en&safe=off&q=%22internet+business%22
Martin Russell added these pithy words on Sep 25 07 at 3:52 amNot sure what Google is doing exactly, but my keywor of interest “self help” dips out at about 920-930 too.
However “click here” stops at 590-615, even though there are 1,360,000,000 of those.
I’m not sure how to meaningfully compare these two keyword terms.
Donald Mckenzie Jr added these pithy words on Sep 30 07 at 5:37 pmI agree…..when I do a search for my articles the first page will show 1-10 of about 14,100. Then when I get to page 10, it will say something like 78 out of 78. This really gets me annoyed.
Aurelius Tjin added these pithy words on Oct 05 07 at 12:25 amWell, searches on google can be inaccurate sometimes. You have to type specific keywords or filter your search.
A good keyword gets the best and most relevant results.
Darren added these pithy words on Oct 10 07 at 8:24 amThanks! Ive just learnt a new market research tool!
Susan Suarez added these pithy words on Oct 11 07 at 2:41 pmThank you for sharing this explanation.
blogstheme.com added these pithy words on Oct 12 07 at 8:46 amWhy this blog is not updated, it has lots of traffic and subscribers… It’s a shame.
Lucas Bellafonte added these pithy words on Oct 14 07 at 7:20 pmI was going to suggest that Google’s “duplicate content” filtering was responsible, but the “click here” example doesn’t fit that theory.
An interesting conundrum to ponder.
Thanks!
Steve M added these pithy words on Oct 14 07 at 8:55 pmWhen the numbers get that large it all is a bit meaningless. Thanks for the enlightening insight into the googleplex
Aaron Brandon added these pithy words on Oct 16 07 at 12:12 amHey Jon,
Congrats on getting the #1 Google result for the term: my internet business penis is bigger than yours
I think we all know that was your goal.
- Aaron
Jon added these pithy words on Oct 16 07 at 8:52 amAaron, of course that was my goal. I already have the screenshot framed and mounted in the offices of my SEO service.
btw, why would you be searching for “my internet business penis is bigger than yours” in the first place? We all know we’ll never compete with JB in that department.
Creative Investor added these pithy words on Oct 18 07 at 9:25 amI think the reason the it might show only 1,000 out of a million results is because Google judges those to be the most relevant and meaningful, but it does show that there are some million other references (which by the way you can still see by clicking a link on the last page of search results) so you get an idea how popular that keyword is and maybe you need to be a bit more specific.