Comments on: Google Lies: Different Keyword Competition Results

By: john larson

john larson — Sat, 29 May 2010 12:46:02 +0000

i think it’s pretty clear google is not straight with the public on how and why they do things (china, liberal bias, etc.)…but they are the big dog and perhaps not perfect, but where else you gonna go?

By: admin

admin — Fri, 08 May 2009 06:19:56 +0000

You’re absolutely right Dan. We put more weight in how well the top 10 sites have been optimized than how many index counts. Its a metric however that is available to us though, so might as well use it to some degree. More on this later…

By: Dan

Dan — Fri, 08 May 2009 03:58:18 +0000

I thought keyword competition had more to do with the strength of the listings on the first page versus the total number of listings. If the top 10-20 are alot stronger than your page, you won’t rank well regardless if there are 10 listings or 10 million.

By: 123 Power System

123 Power System — Tue, 05 May 2009 19:36:29 +0000

It’s a tad more than that… do a search on any topic… note how many “results” Google ‘gives’ you…

Then click on the last page of results (try an exotic search term that doesn’t have too many pages, so you can quickly get to the last page), now examine how many results Google is *NOW* reporting.

The differences can be dramatic, and for people trying to optimize for a particular keyword, it might make the difference between trying for a particular keyword or not.

For example, I just typed in the keyphrase:

red tomato bethesda

Google reports 102,000 results.

But it will only show you 100 pages of results, and changes it’s grand total to just 12,300.

Now I don’t know about you, but 12,300 is, while not exactly a 10th… is close enough to it for argument’s sake. Why is Google reporting initially 10 times more results?

More dramatic examples can be found with a little bit of searching… and interestingly enough, Google appears to learn from it’s mistakes… it apparently starts reporting more accurate results after you’ve done a search.

In other searches, I’ve gone from over 3 million, down to just 335,000… so give it a try… and pay attention, because Google doesn’t always give you accurate numbers until you piddle with them a little…

By: Troy

Troy — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 22:23:06 +0000

Its always some little mundane detail! Thanks for pointing that out Mark.

By: Mark

Mark — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 12:17:33 +0000

Troy, the answer is within your screenshots. One search includes results for all languages. The other for English only. To change that setting, click on “preferences” next to the search button.