Looking at General Motors SERPS
Posted on May 10th, 2006by Michael Gray in Google, SEO
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I was doing a little rank checking today and noticed some strange things appearing in the top of the Google SERPS. So I backed off found a more generic category and did a little testing, I didn’t really reach a conclusion but thought it might be fun to look at and share. Disclaimer up front I’m not getting paid for pushing GM, mmkay…
First up lets look at [General Motors] , we get a link to general motors news stories and two individual stories.
Next let’s look at [general motors cars], now what’s interesting is we still have the link to all stories but only one additional news story. On the day I wrote this there were over 100 stories and probably will be when you read this ([general motors cars] via news search) so I’m curious what made 1 listing drop out.
Let’s try something a little different lets look at [general motors new cars], we’re now up to three news stories. If we do a check on overture we see [general motor car] was searched for 1526 times in April [general motor new car] was searched for 327 times so we’re talking about about four times the search volume. Also note there is no listing for Google Base in the standard search even though there are over 1000 listings in google base at the time [general motors new cars].
Next let’s look at [general motors used cars], now all of the news listings drop out and the Google Base search comes into play. A quick check of google news shows there are news stories [general motors used cars] a quick check in Google Base and we see there are only 800 listings, less than the number of new car items above [general motors used cars]. Overture doesn’t register any significant amount of people searching for [general motors used cars] .
Now if you were paying attention above you noticed that that 2300 people searched for [general motor lindsay lohan] and 1200 people searched for [general motor lindsay lohan fashion show]. Now this says a few things. Firstly we live in sad, and demented world when more people are interested in what Lindsay Lohan did for General Motors than General Motors cars. Secondly searching for [general motors lindsay lohan] should yield some news results, which it doesn’t despite there being news stories [general motors lindsay lohan]
So I’m not sure what conclusion to draw from all of this, as I don’t see a pattern jumping out. I suppose if you sampled a larger keyword base you might find one, but the three that I looked at seemed pretty erratic.
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May 10th, 2006 at 11:32 am
From what it looks like there should be news links when there is no news links and the news links need to be more relevant to the search phrase.
May 10th, 2006 at 3:20 pm
how come for you it says “Try your search on …”
May 10th, 2006 at 4:42 pm
Can you explain the 2 different Title Descriptions on Google for “General Motors” vs “General Motors Cars”
May 10th, 2006 at 4:44 pm
Vex,
Probably because of this: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/743/
May 10th, 2006 at 6:43 pm
Vex: it’s a the customize google plug-in for firefox
http://www.customizegoogle.com/
Spencer: good question seems to have fixed itself now so you’re guess is as good as mine