Keyword quality and the Wordtracker database by Ken McGaffin, 6 October 2006
Search engines get bombarded with automated queries from ranking monitors, popularity analyzers, bid optimizers and other tools. This deluge of non-human activity distorts keyword counts, and if it is not identified and eliminated will leave you with very poor keywords.
Key points
- We get our data straight from the metacrawlers, one of the purest sources of search behavior by real people
- We protect our data sources by constantly monitoring and evaluating raw data, looking for spam and eliminating it from our results
- We allow you to filter out adult-oriented keywords
- Our data contains no hard coded links
- Duplicate results do not exist inside Metacrawler data
Basing your search engine optimization on poor keywords is as sensible as building a house without foundations, as valuable as a ton of fool's gold and as informative as a television set without an aerial.
In short, poor keywords will cost you money, waste your time and bring you zero return. To succeed online you need quality keywords - and that's exactly what provides.
Wordtracker invented the keyword research business, and we have more experience in making sense out of millions of search queries made by real people than anyone else on the planet.
Here's why Wordtracker data is data you can trust:
We get our data straight from the metacrawlers, one of the purest sources of search behavior by real people.
We didn't choose metacrawlers by accident, we chose them because of the quality of the data.
A metacrawler searches all the best search engines from a single screen and we have an exclusive partnership with two of the most popular:
Now metacrawlers are very useful for humans because they save time and bring back reliable results: but they are not very useful for the bots that make automated queries because these bots are interested in results from a single search engine.
So guess what? Humans use the metacrawlers, bots tend not to.
That means that keyword data coming from the metacrawlers is about as clean as you can get. The metacrawler data represents real people searching and is the best way for you to find the words people use when they search.
We protect our data sources by constantly monitoring and evaluating raw data, looking for spam and eliminating it from our results.
Metacrawlers provide the best source of human behavior but of course there will be a hardcore of spammers who will still try to influence results.
We do our utmost to eliminate such spam activity. To survive, a keyword must pass through a minimum of ten different filters before it wins a place in our keyword database. And in addition to these powerful filters our developers constantly monitor our data and any spam that survives is removed within 24 hours.
We allow you to filter out adult-oriented keywords. Many website optimizers are irritated by adult-oriented words that clog up results and waste valuable time. That's why we've developed a proprietary adult filter that gives you the option to remove this material.
Our data contains no hard coded links.
Suppose a webmaster wanted to generate some additional income from his site, say from 'online casinos'. They'd publish a live link with the text 'online casinos' that when clicked triggers a search on a PPC engine. This brings the webmaster a commission but does not represent a natural search by a person as they are being led into the action by the website.
This will in turn inflate the keyword counts. This type of query does not exist inside the Metacrawler data.
Duplicate results do not exist inside Metacrawler data.
We often get asked why our keyword counts are lower than others: the main reason is that we exclude multiple counts.
Many PPC search engines have partnership arrangements in place - one search engine might have at least two or three different PPC engines on their results page. To give an accurate keyword count such duplicate results must be filtered out.
But because PPC engines give you all the data in one lump it can't be filtered out and so is likely to contain many duplicate search terms.
Keyword Research is the only thing we do
Because keyword research is the only thing we do, we're totally focused on giving you the keywords you need to succeed online. We live or die on the quality of our data and it is not surprising therefore that we're obsessive about our data sources.
It is not the quantity of keywords that matters but quality. And the metacrawler data that we use consistently outperforms alternative data sources that we test extensively.
Using Wordtracker, you will continually expand your lists of solid, profitable keywords and your online business will grow and prosper.
For a free seven day trial, go to the Wordtracker Trial Page. And for more information on carrying out your keyword research have a look at at the articles in our Keywords section.
About Ken McGaffin
Ken McGaffin is Chief Marketing Officer at Wordtracker. He is an experienced internet marketing consultant and has worked for major pharmaceutical companies, advertising agencies, government bodies and non-profit organizations.
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Hi there,
Here's a quick update on how the search counts that Wordtracker present are compiled. The metacrawler data makes up just under 1% of US search, and Wordtracker reports on the last 365 days search data, so, if you see a search count of 1000 for a keyword, this means that that exact keyword has been typed into a metacrawler one thousand times by real people in the last year. It may be a relatively small dataset, but it's largely representative of the US search picture, and we've had customers come back to us to tell us they've managed to find keywords that their competitors aren't using.
Wordtracker's old toolset presented a '24 hour predict' figure, which estimated how many times a keyword would be searched for in the next day, but this is not included in the new toolset as it is an estimate rather than a clear reportable figure.
The keyword database is updated daily, and the data is between 16 and 30 hours old when it's released, so it's pretty fresh, and if you're tracking keywords over time, you'll see trends in search and be able to act on those.
I hope this is of some help, but please let us know if you have any other questions.
all the best,
Mal
I'd like to know the same "I'm also curious about what the Searches count mean. That is, is that a count of searches done in the last 24 hours. What's the time componenet of that data? Thanks."
Just joined today. I'm also curious about what the Searches count mean. That is, is that a count of searches done in the last 24 hours. What's the time componenet of that data? Thanks.
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