Today when searching google for the keyword 'incorporation'. I found a totally irrelevant site in position 4. The irrelevant site in question deals with distance education and not 'incorporation of companies'. I decided to try this a little more. I saw the html source of the site in question and didnot find a single occurence of the keyword 'incorporation' on the page. Next, I used a tool to search for its keyword anchor text etc [ http://www.seoguru.co.uk/seo/spy.php ]. Surprise, the site has mostly PR 0 backlinks, with the keyword 'incorporation' occuring only a few times. Apart from that, the tool also gave a nice overview, of the links ratio of the pages that are linking back. The ip class of the links etc. And all the factors shows that nothing spectacular as such is helping the site. Incorporation being a very competitive keyword, it is really funny to see a totally unrelated site, with few low quality backlinks, featuring in position 4.
Well, to be honest, what do you expect? Your search phrase wasn't exactly a clever one either was it. And you say so yourself. You type 'Incorporation' and expect results for 'Incopropration of companies'. That's just a silly search then IMO. Look it up in the dictionary and you'll see there is NO REASON WHATSOEVER that Google should present you with 'Corporation of comanies' results only. And think about it. If someone asks you to name 10 relevant resources about a 1 word subject... That's well hard. Words have more than 1 meaning. That's why 1 word searches are always dodgy. Don't use 1 word searches, it's asking for trouble.
You mean to say, If I search for the word casino, its ok for google to throw up a site about 'botany' in the top 10. Wat I meant to say was, Incorporation is a pretty competitive keyword so a totally unrelated site showing up is really surprising.
Relevancy is mostly in the eye of the searcher. To expect all 10 results to read your mind is a bit much. Someone recently complained about a book coming up for their search when they actually thought their site was more relevant (say their site sold blue widgets but a book called "Blue Widgets" came up first) If the searcher was looking for that book, suddenly the idea of relevance changes. Most examples I've seen so far on why Google is no longer "Relevant" are seriously flawed. __________________ Health Forum | Submit your site - No Recip Needed | Get Your Site Ranked Quick - Coop Network
I agree that to target one word phrases is not a good idea but my logs show that the #2 keyphrase used by surfers to find one of my sites is the single word 'showers' (MSN has me listed at #2). I've never targeted that particular word. That tells me there are less tham ingenious people out there surfing the web and they don't really know how to best use a search engine. God bless them.
Just out of curiosity, what would you expect to show up for that keyword? Casino locations, reviews, laws, books, games, strategies, news or direct links to casinos? Then, are you searching for online or land based casinos?
This seems to be were Google is going lately-- giving SEO'ers a hard time, and to hell with the actual usefulness of the SERPs to the end-users. MSN will kill them. -- Derek
Here we go, another "msn is going to take over the world" nay sayer. msn is going to be gamed so hard that they won't be any better than anyone else in returning relevant results.
MSN's results are better than Google's lately-- plain and simple. Google has lost site of giving the best results, and if they don't get back on track, they will fall from #1. I already receive more traffic from MSN than Google on one of my sites... I just can't wait until MSN launched their Adsense alternative... -- Derek
Not wanting to add oil on fire. My wife who is not a SEO person complains more and more about google relevancy and every often she asks for a new search engine as she gets more junk than anything else. Her point is that she searched for "wireless keyboard for PC". The first site is Apple computer The 2nd one is a user rating post. The 3rd one is a pdf manual The 4th one is a directory The 5th same in England .... So... she drove me nuts and I finished driving around trying to find the keyboard she needed. It's true that when I search specific information on a small hotel, I get a bunch of junk like hotel-cancun-mexico-hotelname-morewhatever.com or whatever.com/terrific_hotel_cancun_cheap_stuff_cool_beach_hotel_andsoon.html then much lower in the page (I display 100 results per page) I find what I'm looking for. Well I could drive to Cancun and look by myself as I did for the darn keyboard
I'm not trying to one-up you, but I receive 4 times the traffic from MSN as from Google. Needless to say, I really like MSN. And Yahoo's in second place.. I think for shopping, MSN and Yahoo are probably better (I don't really do much shopping on-line); but for "geek" searches, I still use Google. Maybe it's just force of habit..
Well, for most of my sites, Google is still #1 in traffic delivered. However, for my new site, http://www.freetrialdownloads.com/, all of the quality traffic is coming from MSN-- and it's been live for over a month now. I even rank #6 for 'Free Downloads' on MSN-- a VERY competitive/high traffic keyword... All my other sites rank #1 for their targetted keywords on MSN... -- Derek