Google Sitemaps again
Google Sitemaps is becoming my new favourite game, it’s kinda like I don’t believe it and I need to prove it ..
Ok so I need your help .. two tests ..
a) you must be in the UK and search www.google.co.uk for :
Top search queries  |
Average top position | |
| 1. viagra | 11 | |
| 2. buy viagra | 3 | |
| 3. yahoo games | 9 | |
| 4. sky hd box | 9 | |
| 5. yellcom | 7 | |
| 6. tosser | 8 | |
| 7. naylor | 2 | |
| 8. paul mckenna diet | 6 | |
| 9. hd box | 8 | |
| 10. “www bmw” | 8 | |
| 11. google sitemaps | 3 | |
| 12. google suggest | 2 | |
| 13. porsche | 28 | |
| 14. backlink checker | 8 | |
| 15. sky hd | 20 | |
| 16. digg | 4 | |
| 17. fat arse | 8 | |
| 18. synonyms | 9 | |
| 19. kinghost | 6 | |
| 20. sky hd boxes | 10 |
and then tell if you think Google Sitemaps are right or wrong
b) come from the US and search google for :
| Top search queries |
Average top position | |
| 1. buy viagra | 11 | |
| 2. fuck me | 16 | |
| 3. kinghost | 6 | |
| 4. hahahaha | 7 | |
| 5. daven | 2 | |
| 6. backlink checker | 9 | |
| 7. christine dolce nude | 5 | |
| 8. viagra cheap | 9 | |
| 9. david naylor | 1 | |
| 10. irankicks | 9 | |
| 11. search ingines | 8 | |
| 12. blue tomatoes | 5 | |
| 13. yellcom | 8 | |
| 14. bmw fr | 4 | |
| 15. v7n | 8 | |
| 16. sorry unable to process request at this time error 999 | 2 | |
| 17. sky hd box | 11 | |
| 18. overture bid | 9 | |
| 19. christine dolce naked | 8 | |
| 20. naylor | 12 |
and tell me if sitemaps are wrong..
also where the fuck did …
| 19. christine dolce naked |
that search term come from …???
DaveN
Befound 2509 days ago
http://www.vinden.netThanks for the info Dave, now I know what keywords to target.
The Sitemaps results are pretty accurate. The positions are averages and they include all websearches (if websearches is selected) for Google.co.uk. Sometimes people used the “pages from the UK” radio button where you could rank 1st place and sometimes it’s all searches where you might rank 10th place. So the averages are counted when someone viewed the page with your result somewhere on it. When someone doesn’t follow through to result page #… your ranking isn’t added to the average.
The most interesting thing is too find out where you’re loosing visitors. Terms where you are found very frequently, but not clicked often. Too bad Google doesn’t show counts and doesn’t go beyond the top 20.
The main difference between US and UK is the ranking you’ve achieved with extra points for locality and the language differences like “Tosser” and “Fat arse”. I’m going to target those too.
DaveN 2509 days ago
No worries Befound, you might want to add … this one
Vanessa Fox 2509 days ago
http://sitemaps.blogspot.comHi Dave,
Some things to keep in mind about the query stats…
-They are averaged over a three week period, so any big fluctuations during that period may make the stats seem off.
-They are top overall queries. For instance, say your site isn’t about Britney Spears, but you’ve mentioned her a few times and so your site ranks for her (although likely doesn’t rank well). Your site is actually about purple apples. So, if a million people search for Britney and 10 people search for purple apples, then Britney is going to show as a top query. And you might look at that and say, my site isn’t even about her. How can that query be higher for my site than what my site is actually about? But in sheer number of searches, Britney is a top query for the site.
Are there particular stats around queries that we don’t have available that you would find more useful?
DaveN 2509 days ago
Hi Vanessa ..
Btw i like sitemaps, so at least i’m on record saying that !
the problem I have is the terms “christine dolce naked” and “christine dolce nude”, I have never mentioned her on my blog at all ..
but I will dig deeper and I hope I will find the anwser
DaveN
Vanessa Fox 2509 days ago
http://sitemaps.blogspot.comMy early morning, under-caffeinated guess is that you linked to this threadwatch story (http://www.threadwatch.org/node/7076) in your “industry news” section and at some point, that may have been on the same page as links pointing to this post: http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/archives/2006/03/21/naked-truth-about-shoemony/ and possibly some anchor text pointing to your site includes the word “nude” (the cached page info seems to indicate so).
And when searching for christine dolce naked became a popular thing to do, your site may have been an early one to have all the keywords.
DaveN 2509 days ago
Yep I agree.. yahoo shows the outbound link in the cache on one of the pages, nice spot vanessa … the nude link will have been when i did the Naked Bull riding thing
DaveN
Joe 2509 days ago
http://www.mangofalls.comDave… take it as a hint. More “christine dolce naked” please
Matt Cutts 2509 days ago
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/Was there some Christine Dolce information around here? Oh, Vanessa’s got it covered. Right-o. I’ll just move along then.
johnweb 2509 days ago
http://www.hvac-direct.comDave,
I’ve contributed on the threadwatch post as to what I’d like to see. Thanks to Venessa for clearing up that queries thing, it makes more sense now.
I bought an expired domain that was about some sort of band years ago, I’m going to change the subject entirely someday, but added it to the sitemaps console. It’s showing statistics for the domain’s search queryes even though there is nothing to return as I’ve robot.txt the whole thing out until I figure what to do with it.
So if you know anyone that wants to rank for lymp biscit (or close to that) let me know, as I have a domain that’s rankinging already without a page published!
John
johne 2508 days ago
http://learn-to-market-online116.blogspot.com/Top Search Queries…. What does it mean?
It’s explained as: “Top search queries are the queries on the selected search property that most often returned pages from your site” …over the previous three weeks.
Does this mean that:
a. These are the searches that my site ranks highest on. – I don’t think so since I know there are searches where I am number one but which are not listed. Those are lower volume searches.
b. These are the highest volumes searches that returned my site in the results. If this is true, what is the cut-off that google is using to say that my site was “returned”? My table has seaches where the highest average position is 11.
I thought b. was the answer but Vanessa said that this couldn’t be the whole story since she has seen tables where people are listed with positions as low as the 40s.
I’ve now thought of a third possible explanation…
c these are the highest volume searches where some minimum number of people actually clicked on my link.
This is the only explanation that I can think of that can explain this table.
This would require Google to:
1 – Find searches that people have clicked on my site
2 – Prioritize them by volume
Explanation C also makes sense because its using similiar data to whats in the second table but in a different way. I will test this by picking some huge volume term such as “learning games” or “homeschool” (where I place around 40th) and click on them and see if these terms hit the table. Stay tuned….
Sean Carlos 2502 days ago
http://www.antezeta.com/On yesterday’s Strike Point there was discussion of report sections, such as top page ranked page in a month, not showing up in Google’s Sitemaps dashboard.
I have seen the same behaviour – it appears to be related to the “Google Love Factor”. Site map features will either be hidden or will carry the tag “Data is not available at this time” for less “relevant” sites.
While it is easy to understand that Google needs to ration its resources, hiding documented features just seems to create confusion. At least there should be a message clearly indicating that the feature is not available for a given site – with a reason, i.e. due to insufficient data, low love etc.
The presence of information does not appear to be related to a need to propagate data for a new “Sitemap” (i.e. Google webmaster dashboard) account – the data seems to be already present if your site is important enough. It does not show up, even after months, if your site is less loved.
In detail, I’ve seen the following in the site statistics sections:
1. Query stats
The Top search queries and Top search query clicks sections seem to always appear – good.
The message “Data is not available at this time.” appears if data is not present, or in some cases, when there are system problems.
2. Crawl stats
The “Status” and “The PageRank of your pages in Google ” sections seem to always be available.
The “Your page with the highest PageRank” section is hidden if your site doesn’t have enough love.
3. Page status
The “Content Type” and “Content Encoding” sections always seem to be present.
The keyword density reports, “Common Words In your site’s content” and “Common Words In external links to your site” are hidden if you don’t have enough love.
What would be nice is greater clarity – when announcing and documenting the features, Google should indicate that features won’t be available if certain thresholds aren’t met.
See also: http://www.antezeta.com/google-sitemaps-webmaster-dashboard.html and http://www.threadwatch.org/node/7387
johne 2487 days ago
Now that search engine strategies has discussed but completely missed the point on this question, I’ll raise it again. What does this mean? “Top search queries are the queries on the selected search property that most often returned pages from your site” …over the previous three weeks.
1. These are the highest volumes searches that returned my site in the results. If this is true, what is the cut-off that google is using to say that my site was “returned”? My table has seaches where the highest average position is 11.
I thought this was the answer but Vanessa said that this couldn’t be the whole story since she has seen tables where people are listed with positions as low as 40. Could google be listing any search that returns as at all so that any possible mention of a term means that this gets listed? Is so, this is a pretty dumb table.
2 these are the highest volume searches where some minimum number of people actually clicked on my link.
This is the explanation that makes some sens of this table except that it would require Google to:
– Find searches that people have clicked on my site
- Prioritize them by volume
Explanation 2 also makes sense because its using similiar data to whats in the second table but in a different way.
thoughts?
Ken 2480 days ago
http://recognizedesign.com/2006/07/30/myspace-marketing-la-dolce-weba/Christina Dolce is a MySpace ‘celebrity,’ if that part of it remains a mystery…
Interesting post, by the way.
Hone Watson 2454 days ago
http://www.honewatson.comWhat’s bizarre is I also am turning in a top result for ‘Christina Dolce nude’ in some of the datacenter’s even though I’ve never heard of her let alone written about her.