workfromhome

I have always wondered about search engines specially Google. Being one of the biggest and earning billions I would have thought they would have everything sorted. Well you would have thought so with all that money. But I wonder. They seem to spend more time trying to stop people from earning money than they do cleaning up their act.

Now I am not one of those people who want to rip Google off. I create some blogs, put good content on and then hope to earn some sort of pittance by encouraging people to visit them. Great! I followed and implemented great free advice from webinaires such as “Stompernet” “The 30 day challenge” and a few others. Fantastic they are. Now I do not want to crucify Google or the like but I am a very technical guy. I have spent most of my life analyzing blooming great computer dumps from huge mainframes trying to find out what there was a crash. (Big banks do not like that) So I became quite proficient at detecting anomalies across reams and reams of digital readouts.

I started on the “workfromhome” thing when I retired and I decided that I would spend a certain portion of my time looking at certain aspects of SEO. (Sorry! “Search Engine Optimization”).

During my startup in the “Work From Home” arena I was very unimpressed on my earnings from Adsense. Yes I invested in a few of those great “Earn millions with Adsense” programs to no avail. I eventually got caught up with the “30 day challenge” I followed their challenge and created a blog called “Windows XP Slow Startup” To my surprise I was suddenly at #2 on a Google search on the same search phrase. (“Windows XP slow startup”) Wow I thought. I earned more in one month on Adsense that I had done all the previous year. Mind you it wasn’t world shattering but I was getting income virtually every day.

This convinced me that I should follow the right implementation of constructing a blog that will be recognized as good by Google.

The thing I used as a guide to people visiting my blog was “Google impressions” I thought that although this is not considered a finite interpretation of traffic it was good enough for me. If Google recorded an impression then someone has visited my blog. Not interested that they may visit multiple time, if they did the more likely they may click on an Adsense advert.

I became puzzled why ther were some big dips and high. So due to my technical curiosity I decided to look at “searches” and at the same time look at what hyphenating key phrases, URLs and certain words that can be hyphenated( e.g. “startup” can be “startup”, “start up” or “start-up”) and see what affect these had on searches.

As with all analysis’s some unexpected things can turn up and this was no exception especially when I decided to cover the three great search engines. “Goggle”, “Yahoo” and “MSN”.

I decided to search on my search phrase “windows XP slow startup” and as I mentioned earlier this can be represented by: - “windowsxpslowstartup”, “windows xp slow startup” and “windows-xp-slow-startup”. What would the difference be searching on the different representation of the phrase. I used “quotes” for all search phrases.

This was the difference for “windowsxpslowstartup”:

Google search: 134 returns where my site was listed #1
Yahoo search: 128 returns where my site was listed #1
MSN search: 380 returns where my site was listed None but heaps of social site entries. But MSN seems to have some intelligence that worked out that I may have meant “windows XP slow startup” but it gave me the option of just showing the results for :windowsxpslowstartup” where it gave me a result of 19. It did not show my home page but all the results were from social sites.

This was the difference for “windows XP slow startup”

Google search: 2230 returns where my site was listed #2
Yahoo search: 3660 returns where my site was listed #7 but I had a couple of social sites listed higher.
MSN search: 381 returns where my site was listed #4 but not my home page but the archive page (http://www.windowsxpslowstartup.how-do-you-do.info/windows-xp-slow-startup/)

Now for the interesting one. (windows-XP-slow-startup)

Google search: 2230 returns where my site was listed #2
Yahoo search: 3660 returns where my site was listed #7 but I had a couple of social sites listed higher.
MSN search: 382 returns where my site was listed #7 but not my home page but the archive page (http://www.windowsxpslowstartup.how-do-you-do.info/windows-xp-slow-startup/)

So what do we have here. It would appear that hyphens make really no difference in the search but the term “windowsxpslowstartup” does with the exception of MSN where it seems to have a more intelligent search engine but also seems to search on different criteria.

The thing that puzzled me was Google. With the repeated searches I sometimes got 2230 results and sometimes 70 results. I was still #2 but what gives. One other thing I did was a search by region and selected USA and did not get mentioned except in social sites.

What the heck Google. Is your search engine flaky. My website is on a USA based server so what gives. I give up.

So what are we supposed to think. As always it will be our fault configuration of my browser or something but this belies the fact that I get listed second when all regions are selected but do not show as listed when the USA region is selected.

I did another test. I did a search on broad the broad based term. That is I searched without the quotes which meant a search was done looking for all the keyword in “windows XP slow start up” wherever they appeared but all of them have to be there. I got a result of 353,000 and was listed #5. When I selected the USA region I was not listed at all. This is crazy. This sort of thing does not make one rely on the integrity of the search engines. I also did a search on other English speaking regions but still did not get listed except on social sites. Not sure what is happening with the Google search engine but sure does not seem reliable.

Or am I missing something. Soldier on I will.