The other day it was brought to my attention that Google queries for certain keywords will give you some strange, “organic” results.
I haven’t been able to find any information about this particular problem, and I wondered if anyone else had run into the same thing.
In our SEO office, we have a sales team that runs through a great presentation online with potential clients. Part of the presentation includes examples of key words that our clients have ranked very well with.
As such, our sales team runs through the same Google queries multiple times a day while on the phone, talking the client through the search on the phone as well. It seems now that we are seeing a well-worn path through the Google search universe, and unrelated key words are turning up in the search results.
Try it for yourselves. Search for “Alabama metal roofing” on Google and see if you don’t get “see results for ‘financial statement software’” and “Also see ‘direct marketing leads’”. If you don’t – that’s great! But we’ve tested this on multiple computers on multiple IPs throughout the city and are finding the same results.
Before anyone asks, yes – we tried this both signed in AND out of our Google accounts.
Another pre-emptive: as far as I can tell, this isn’t Google’s mid-page See results that was first reported in 2005. At least with that, the suggested results were related search query. What we’re running into are completely unrelated search results being mixed.
You can find a video with a similar example here, but it’s still not quite what we seem to be dealing with. They included an update in 2007 to the original post with a link to “Google Difficult Words”, but I don’t think “direct marketing leads” qualifies as difficult.
This has moved beyond Google trying to guess what you meant with your search query or helping you understand a difficult word.
It seems that Google is trying to anticipate the user’s next move by giving its predicted results for the upcoming search. Our sales team has been going from “Alabama metal roofing” to “financial statement software” to “direct marketing leads” as examples for our clients.
So what’s the problem?
Well the problem is that this “pathway” is giving the end user some very non-organic search results. Just because you’re searching for Alabama metal roofing does not mean you’re interested in direct marketing leads. These are unrelated terms!
The same problem exists if you run a search for “direct marketing leads”. You’ll come across Google’s suggested results for “financial statement software”. Strangely, we haven’t had the problem with just a search for “financial statement software”.
We had a discussion about this in the office, and decided the most recent Google algorithm change turned the search engine in a large lawn of sorts. Each potential search query represented a point in the lawn, and if a certain pathway was taken frequently enough (like first searching “Alabama metal roofing” and then “financial statement software”), a pathway could be formed.
Search engine algorithms are essentially mathematical formulas designed to figure out what the end user is looking for, so it’s no stretch of the imagination that Google is now actively monitoring search patterns and attempting to offer up search results for a search that hasn’t even been performed yet. Hmm, pre-emptive, anticipatory actions based on things that haven’t happened yet…
Did anyone watch Tom Cruise in Minority Report? This doesn’t bode well…
By: Zack S.
