"The Hard, Cold SEO Secret They Don't Want
You To Know About"

 

Let me give it to you straight:

Or put another way... "same, not same."

Same, Not Same is one of my favorite Japanese quotes. It doesn't mean similar. It means that on the surface things look alike but at their core there are real differences.

If this isn't deep, heavy shit I don't know what it.

Ok, so let's lay this out with an example for you.

Say I am trying to make a little jack in the debt reduction and debt consolidation business...

We're going to use the keyword phrase get rid of debt. Feel free to follow along with your own.

As a word stem, this phrase is "ok". Google reports that it gets a reasonable amount of search traffic even on exact match. I wouldn't want to take out PPC on this phrase but there are some gems if you look at Google's and MSN's tools here.

That's all fine and dandy for PPC but right now I don't give a shit. I want to talk about ranking in the top 10 or top 20 listings...

And Here's Where It Gets Interesting

Google, Yahoo, and MSN don't agree on the number of pages at all for this term.

Now I am not an idiot. I know all about Google's supplemental index and all that crap. The point here is that on a surface level there isn't a lot of similarity even in the raw number of results.

Google is reporting 746X less results. WTF!?

That should be your first red flag. Here's the second:

 

No, this isn't a needlepoint pattern gone bad - It's a picture of the top 100 search results from Google and Yahoo.

Every dot is a search engine result page. Every colored dot is when a page appears in both Google and Yahoo.

Pretty cool, huh?

But look at the results:

Ever hear someone say that they are getting traffic ONLY from Google? Or only from Yahoo? Know you know why.

Google and Yahoo are different.

 

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