This isn’t exactly recent news, and maybe more along the lines of criticism. But so many clients and people in the industry have referred to it that we had to take a closer look.
It has been six months since Google Instant officially became part of the default search results in the US (and since then in some other countries too), and actually there is an interesting transcript of a presentation at SMX in New York that touches base on this.
But that’s more of a side note. What I want to talk about here is that when people type in a query and see keyword or brand variations suggested, they think that these are the top terms people are querying based on the main term. For example, if you look for “Reform Digital”, Google will suggest “Reform Digital Limited” or “Reform Digital SEO” or “Reform Digital London”. Fair enough. Google Instant will often suggest up to five terms as you conduct your search, and they are often some of the top variations of the query; however that is not always the case and they don’t appear in any particular order.
A recent test, based on data from different clients and companies that we work with, as well as Google data, showed that the suggested terms were actually a selection of five key terms found in what Google considered to be the top ten queries around a term. From as long ago as 2006 you could go to a URL on which Google was testing what was then known as “Google Suggest”, where they used estimates of Google impressions (perhaps query estimates?), which differ by market. Google then took the top ten variations that it sees in terms of impressions and lists them out. Have a look at the following URL which we generated using the term “mobile phone” as an example, to see what we’re talking about http://www.google.co.uk/complete/search?output=toolbar&q=mobile%20phone (or http://www.google.com/complete/search?output=toolbar&q=mobile%20phone if you want to see the US variations). This kind of query can be done with any term to see what terms Google Suggest would return (ie first four or five listed on the page) and to see what the other contenders are (based on query totals next to most terms).
So what we saw is that Google picks the five search terms that it’s going to show via various parameters, but to have a decent chance of being listed amongst those five, you need to at least be in its list of the top ten (or know how to automate queries etc). In terms of timings, we saw that Google Instant’s suggestions don’t respond immediately to changes in impression volumes, there is some delay. When checking for AT&T following the announcement that they were buying T-Mobile at the weekend, it wasn’t until late on Monday that a T-Mobile variation appeared in the list of top ten key terms, and even then there was no “impression total” next to it (it’s the only keyword suggestion with no data on that above URL).
Or, for another example, for the term “Reform” (including the space, as if you were going to add another word), Google’s top ten list includes the term “Reform Digital”, and it actually now gets the most queries of the group. But as a newer addition to the list, it’s not one of the five being suggested when you search in Google proper.
So Google Suggest is definitely sensitive to a combination of historic data and trends, and, like everything else on Google, it’s subject to manipulation. Website owners have looked at getting users to query variations to make their business look cleaner, for example “Business Name scam” is a common suggestion. Tools such as Amazon Mechanical Turk – where users are paid very small amounts to do basic tasks such as “like” or tweet something – have also been used by sites in the past to try and manipulate the results, as have several other methods of pushing query data.
This issue comes into play when looking at brand reputation. What if one of the ten terms was some other negative comment about your company? How can we get a more positive variation up there in its place? Of course, if all five of Google’s suggestions were negative, you probably have other problems!
Blog post by Niall Madden, Search Director of Reform
Update: “Scam” variations of a keyword are now blacklisted in Google Instant – so… “Business Name scam” won’t reveal a drop down. Nor does it appear in the URL that lists the 10 keyword variations. However, some brand names still have the “scams” variation, for now.
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