It's been a long time since we had a differential diagnosis post here on SEOmoz, but we've been getting lots of comments and emails requesting some mysteries, so here goes:
#1 - Who, Exactly, is Awesome, and Why?
I agree with the sentiment of the second result, Google is an awesome product, but this ranking is very bizarre given the content and links pointing to this page/site. The other engines certainly don't agree that it belongs anywhere near the top of the SERPs.
#2 - Bing and the Hash
In the past, search engines have been known to ignore the hash in URLs and treat internal anchors as invisible to their link graph. While Bing has done a lot of things right and earned Microsoft some of the best praise they've received in years on the search front, treating internal anchors as separate URLs could cause a lot of problems. In this example, it's a relevancy issue, but in other cases it could seriously screw with canonicalization in the link graph (and force webmasters to re-think their use of the hash in URLs).
#3 - Where are the Cheap Books?
The Half.Ebay.com URL is an odd one to have at the top of these results. Not only is there a much more relevant "books" page at https://books.half.ebay.com, there's also no mention of the word cheap anywhere here (and precious little anchor text pointing to this page with that term either). It almost makes me wonder if Google's doing something with synonyms to rank this page here.
OK - now it's your turn to solve the mysteries above. Please reward valiant efforts and great insight with thumbs up!
I recently started an adwords campaign for a client and I never realized how much Google pays attention to synonyms. A term like commercial debt, or commercial collection brought up 100+ keywords/synonyms.
So it's pretty obvious why Half is number 1, because it's such a well trusted site, heavily trafficked, and I am sure thousands of people link to half all the time. (esp. us broke college students) It may not have the term cheap, but we all know that half.com is one of the cheapest places to buy books. Yeah kinda scary to think A.I. is getting that smart but Google def. has their algorithm to think like a normal searcher would. I think with Wave we also see the kind of A.I. Google is really working with, and it's pretty intelligent.
I think we should all pay attention to this reply. Dustinma makes a great point that Google really does know what we are trying to look for. Rather than just following a set algorithm Google has started to learn to think like a human.
Good job Dustin!
"Google really does know what we are trying to look for"
It's one of the few things that drives me to an alternate engine, when _I_ know what I'm looking for, enter the terms I want to find and have listings at the top of page 1 without the terms (and sometimes not related).
I trust G too much, the abstract and title look wrong for the search but I assume it must be relevant - doesn't look spammy so I go the the page, page search on the terms I'm after and ... gah!
G needs a "i know what I'm frikkin searching for already" option.
So far all I have seen associating half.ebay.com with cheap is Google Adwords ads.
Some of the linking pages have the word cheap in the text and or title tag but in most cases the pages are not optimized for cheap and the ebay link is found nowhere near the cheap text.
On a side note, I just noticed that Ebay has hundreds if not thousands of domains redirecting to various pages on their site.
CheapBooks.info simply redirects to CheapBooks.com --- uh oh!? Who is their SEO??! :)
Thumbs up for the catch - looks like a 302, and a great little strategy for getting more visibility in top results on a competitive query. My guess is that CheapBooks.com bought CheapBooks.info, and rather than grab the link juice with a 301, they went for the extra SERPs placement with the 302.
good catch on the 302, and the SERP strategy behind it. Smart!
It could also be an affiliate of Cheapbooks.com. They get a certain amount for every sell!
About us page on cheapboobks.com have the same data as WHOIS for cheapbooks.info
Hi,
for the keyword "Salary Shield,"salaryshieldsucks.com ranks 4th in google. There is nothing but two letters "XX" on the site.
Can anybody explain?
Strange,
Yahoo Site Explorer has not any data about the url/domain. Linkscape said "Although our index is large, we currently have no data for this URL". Page itself hasn't title at all. Internet Archive don't have anything about the site
Additionally, exact match search lists the site as well.
Any ideas?
I'm tempted to shift all my content to a 'googleisawesome' subdomain ...
i do believe that "googleisawesome.com" is a great foundation for the ability to rank for "is awesome". maybe google wants to promote itself too a little??? hm? hm? hm?
also though, to kinda piggy back @adders, some of the anchor text, yes, is set as the domain name, or just "google is awesome" as specified. however, i have looked at some of the links, and it appears as though there may be some link dropping in blogs and forums, and it appears as though this "joe wilkinson" guy is a blog moderator too, which has landed him some links back with his name being the anchor text, as well as his site.
it is funny though that a website with nothing done in the code, no content for the visitors, was registered in 06, and has a medial amount of links from various sources; would rank so well in a result returned list of 187M.
again, maybe google wants to do a little subliminal mind sculpting for searchers???
[kyle is awesome, kyle is awesome, kyle is awesome]
4000+ indexed pages and PR2. Even more interesting, the search page of their phpbb forums has a PR4. Most of the incoming links appear to be from a host of various blogs.
I just can't get over TEST1 TEST2
Kingfisher Investor Relations as it were.
Odd idd idd.
Half.com SO looks like a mix of a brand being rewarded and synonyms.
I'm relatively new to the SEO game and have heard a lot lately about semantics. Could this be Google attempting to strengthen or build towards that type of robust search capability? How much do they have already?
Hi all. With regard to the Half.com ranking, I remember reading a post somewhere years ago where a Googler maintained that the algo was already designed to try and match query intent along with the keywords direclty being searched upon, which could include displaying results that were synonymically (spelling? word?) relevant.
Further, we've heard the SE reps talk about how they continue to try and better understand user intent via their algo, and we should not always rely on on-page factors because they are not always the best signal of relevancy
There are clearly some external factors at work here (assuming that this is not a hand-job... get your minds out of the gutter) that need to be considered. Consider that Half.com has a louder social voice (more social media links, more links from blogs, better/more press releases, more partners and a well-known parent company). I am sure that external web pages, blog posts and articles linking to Half.com also use words cheap, budget, shoe string and the like within their content surrounding the links to or mention of half.com. Last but not least, the association with ebay plays a huge factor with this high ranking.
As such, I'm not totally shocked by this high ranking. I think without the association to ebay, this high of a ranking would be extremely hard to duplicate, if at all possible by a lesser brand or an affiliate. And even if there was success, I'd imagine it would be short-lived.
Note: I see this even with AdWords for my industry. Approximately 51% of the consumers within our niche search for our products using the keyword base of "phone cards" and the other 49% uses the keyword base of "calling cards."
Following, I have personally seen our AdWords ads and those of others being dispalyed optimized for calling cards when my query was for phone cards. I cannot say for sure how others' campaigns are setup, but ours are setup in such a way that this should never happen.
As such, there are factors other than on-page, which greatly play into perceived relevancy and user intent. I will even go so far as to say that these off-page factors are relied upon to a significantly greater degree within highly competitive niches.
Yeah I talked about that earlier in a comment, Google not only analyzes the search, it analyzes things around your search, such as what you have already shown interest in, and what you are probably going to show interest in. We see this in a very simplified form with the Google Wonder Wheel, and we have seen Google's ability to comprehend sentences, words, and such with Wave.
With the Google Adwords keyword searching tool it's pretty amazing the stuff they come up with, things a "think tank" marketing group may not even come up with, and not nearly as fast as the few seconds Google does. I guess with the many years Google has been running they have constantly been saving searches, and seeing trends. Google may just very well know what the average user is going to search before they even search it.
Thus searching "cheap books" send them directly to half.com, because they already know where they will want to end up at. It's almost like a fortune teller, you go to them saying where should I shop for cheap books I am thinking about cheapbooks.com and they return the answer Half.com or Amazon.com, when cheap books may have no direct relation.
The checkbox for including synonyms in Google's External Keyword Tool does prove to us that they collect the data and use it to match relevancy and user intent to user queries. How much exactly, who knows.
Funny, I had to check the WhoIs on www.googleisawesome.com (it is not Google owned), I recently wrote a post on www.googlesucks.com
It's not a very interesting post IMO (the one you wrote) - it's pretty basic rep management for companies to own their own examplesucks.com domain (and permutations). I had to check to see if you wrote it just to link drop (perhaps you backdated?).
Just in case anyone else is tempted to click the link.
Its kind of like if you search for the term "click here". the first page that comes up is adobe. hmmm i wonder why that is? obviously many people using that text to link to places like adobe, google, weather.com....
This post reminds me of my teachings in media and information at uni. One of the recurrent themes was about maintaining a healthy dose of skepticism when consuming media. SERP pages should be viewed with a dose of critical thinking for the same reasons.
Now, 'googleisawsome' is rank #1! Duh!
There's something weird also; aside from the weird homepage of the domain that even has a broken link to the image, if you came through looking into the source (right ckick ---> show page source in firefox) you'll disvover that there is neither 'Keywords' nor 'Description' in the meta tags!
Strange but True!
I am a regular user of Google and recently I have came to know of Bing. I am a bit confused of the working of the Bing search engine. Google Ranks the links according to their certain factors related to the website and links. Bing is still yet very confusing..
I've just started going to SEO meetups in my area because I became aware (when my daughter got engaged) that "local" searches in google for wedding vendors return pages of useless directory sites. In one egregious example, "wedding musicians north carolina" (or something like that) had as its first return a directory with NOT ONE musician from NC on its site. I'm a wedding musician and we used to get a lot of work from google but in the last few years, not so - I think it's because we got buried by the directory sites. I started a new site (https://weddingmusicinnc.com) and am trying to follow the suggestions I find at SEOMOZ and at the meetups to see if I can make headway against the big guys. Meanwhile, though, my daughter is furious because it's become so difficult to actually find, say, a local cake vendor, because the Knot and all these other national fakeout sites are suppressing local people unless the locals pay for advertising.
Good luck! The great thing about SEO is that there's a wealth of information to be found on the net. There's a lot of misinformation too, but if you still to the more reputable sites (like SEOmoz), and avoid the little half-witted bloggers, then you will learn, and you will succeed.
My comment relates to this: [Bing] could seriously screw with canonicalization in the link graph (and force webmasters to re-think their use of the hash in URLs)
The comment is correct, but no different to the way Google inadvertently drives the web due it's position and policies.
What might be interesting is a situation where Bing gets closer to Google's market share, and then one implements a policy that conflicts with the other. For example, imagine if Bing started actively punishing contextual links.
The bing thing I believe was put there by a human reviewer.
If you search the url with the hash the result will be the url without hash. The only showing of the url with the hash mark is in the authority listing.
I was checking out SEOmoz authority listing and comparing it to the one in Google and they are completely different. The one in Bing doesn't even have a blog link. =(
I have no idea, maybe googleisawesome.com ranks high only because there is no much competition for that keyword and its internal links are enough. If you type "allinanchor:is awesome" in Google, it is still (apparently) the second result with more links with "is awesome" in achor text. But of course, maybe the allinanchor is not very reliable anyway.
I think that makes sense - the supporting depth of the PHP forum filled with keyword repetition is enough here because there's so little competition that matches or supersedes it.
I'm not so sure about the whole "there's no competition." Look at the sites ranking below them - https://www.thefutureisawesome.com/, https://www.givingisawesome.com/, etc. - there's a number of sites that have way more anchor text, more relevant on page content, title tags and the words in the root domain name. As I mentioned in the post, Bing & Yahoo! have results that look nothing like this (and that's rare - there's usually a good deal of overlap).
Here's a simple quick spreadsheet - Google has indexed a lot more content on GoogleIsAwesome.com than the others. I am betting this is because of the PHPBB - lots of continually new content added steadily over time.
The other two sites have much less unique content on their pages.
And since there's links at least in some of those pages to that frakkin home page, and the "Google Is Awesome" words all over the forum, in whole and in part, that's counting for something as far as Google is concerned. That's got to be the cause. Brute force depth on-site.
looking at the ebay listing, it certainly tells you that there is some manipulation of top results in google.
The first one is easy. Its a PHPBB site with a couple hundred pages indexed that all have Google Is Awesome in forum page titles, links, footers, and over 6000 entries. the keyword is all over the forums content in full and split form.
Since Google is so lousy at properly filtering out crap, it's earned its place in the rankings.
Still weird that https://googleisawesome.com/, which has no relevant content on it, is the one ranking vs. any of the other internal pages (which don't have links to that homepage and don't link back to it)...
Rand, according to Yahoo there's 44 internal pages pointing to the home page. I did a quick check on one and sure enough, there's links to the home page of the site to "Visit Poster's Web Site".
Follow-up - it's actually multiple links pointing to that home page on the PHPbb page I examined.
I know this is a craptastic reason to give them high ranking but remember we're talking about Google - the site that lets spam sites rank #1 by using phony page counter sites exist where those plant free page counters on thousands of trash sites all over, and where those sites have nothing to do with the site linked to. Even though Google claims they don't count those craptastic links.
The half.com entry could be Google rewarding brands.
They got a boost for Used Books a little while back
https://www.rankpulse.com/used-books?p0=off&p1=off&p2=off&p3=on
Unfortunately that site doesn't track the term cheap books. But on the surface it doesn't look like Half.com has done any on page SEO for either keyword but still ranks nicely for both of them.
I suspect that the 'cheap books' result has more to do with Google mining user behavior than just backlinks. In fact, I'd venture to guess that, when the data is present on high-traffic keywords like 'cheap books,' G's algorithm puts a lot more weight on what individuals from IPs all over the world are clicking on consistently than what keywords the page is optimized for.
Google is Google b/c of A/B testing and listening to the demographic and results like Half showing up (even when other sites have obviously targeted 'cheap books') are just more evidence of that, says I.
I surpose that www.googleisawesome.com benefits from the phrase being in the domian name.
Which, importantly, means that inlinks that take the form of a URL contain this keyword text.
I checked linkdomain:www.googleisawesome.com in yahoo and most links are either "google is awesome" or www.googleisawesome.com or similar.
To my mind this factor is a major reason to get keywords in your domain name...
Hi Guys,
I would say that the e-bay listing is a good example of the extra weighting Google is giving to "Big Brands" therefore easier to rank.
Do you agree?
lol Matt Cutts and everyone from Google say they do not give anything to branding, but without even going there, I'd say it is because Half.com has more traffic, has more trust/authority that is why it comes up. If you think logically when you search cheap books Half.com should be there.
I think this shows keywords aren't everything, and when you attack your niche or your clients niche just remember, you do not need to focus on keywords. Think logically, a lot of people in S.E.O. just follow almost set "rules" such as keywords, between this example, the no follows, etc. start thinking about why people are searching and what they want to see.
People who are searching for cheap books they would want to see half.com, not just sites with keywords for cheap books.
Think smart, not robotic.
noooo don't make us think! :-)
I hope Google think this way all the time, revelance is key issue here.
I have a book brand that does not appear in the first 500 SERs for the term bookshop. However Google does have the brand name in the"searches related to bookshop" at the bottom of the page.
So Google knows people will want to find us when searching Bookshop and sticks us in the related searches links, but doesnt actually return any SER for us on this term? I find that strange and pretty counterintuitive
well, perhaps google is thinking that you have relevance to the "bookshop" term, but perhaps haven't gotten to the point yet to rank well in the main ".com" search for it [which garners approx. 30.8 million results], and the reason why you are listed as an option in the "searches related to bookshop" may be because of that relevance that google thinks you have. hrm?
in any event, with the "related" listings at the bottom, it is giving you a step on to the first page of google for the term "bookshop", even if it's not necessarily the most preferred spot. maybe, if people are clicking through on that listing enough over time, google will consider you to be more relevant, which means that people really want to see your site as it is something that they are looking for, and thusly, you will rank better.
i say congrats. and good luck.
DustinMa has refused to have a mind set. He has not let the computer take over his human rationale
I think a lot of people in S.E.O. forget that we are playing someone else's game.
When you play someone else's game you are going to lose a lot more than you win.
Good point, but it does seem that the same chunk of the algorithm that made Hallmark start ranking for "gifts" could be responsible for Half.com ranking for "cheap books."
In fact, since Half.com isn't as established of a brand, it seems to also work with what Matt Cutts is saying. So brands aren't the answer, but there is some correlation.
Hi DustinMa,
Have you seen this video from Matt Cutts? Granted he doesnt say directly that google will rank big brands higher based purely on size of brand but in my opinion he does highly sugggest it.
He says that they present the best results to the user... not present the most relivant results to the user in an attempt to keep the brands happy and the little people.
https://bit.ly/2Nn55y
its worth the 2 minutes it lasts for.
Great point! I'm all in support of search engine algorithms that take a holistic view to the rankings. If you follow the holistic approach, then it's good for the users, which means it's good for conversions, and good for you. Build good businesses and you shall reap the rewards.
In regards to the "Awesome" search (please feel free to insert "dude" here if you like), Google does have it right at least for the first result.
Portland = Awesome