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I’ve been recruiting some SEOs recently. One of my differentiator questions for the phone interview, has been to ask candidates if they know what “Keyword Density” is, and whether it is important to search engines.
The most common answer that people give to the question on keyword density, is that it used to be important, but that the main value of keyword density analysis nowadays is to avoid keyword stuffing or keyword spamming. Pretty much everyone says that it is important to mention the keyword at least once, preferably with some other related instances, and ideally use semantic markup (or titles, descriptions and headers) to emphasise the keyword.
Not one person has said that you can rank for a keyword without using it on the page – a so-called “Google Bombing” or “Link Bombing” exercise. In a link bombing exercise, you use anchor text to target a page that doesn’t mention the keyword you are focusing on. It was a nice demonstration of the power of backlink anchor text, that you could rank a page against its’ intentions. George Bush was targeted for “miserable failure”, for example.
Interestingly, after the attacks on George Bush’s reputation – but possibly not directly triggered by that, Google eventually implemented a fix to better synchronise page content and backlink anchor text. This fix tool appears to be something that is periodically run, so unexpected results will creep in from time, for up to a few months at a time. The fix that Google seems to have used, is that the targeted keyword should appear in whole or in part, on the targeted page. So George Bush’s CV at the Whitehouse appeared again for the search “miserable failure”, when a Whitehouse staffer referred to some Senate discussions as a “failure”. Close enough for Google to decide there was a match… until the tool was run again.
And it looks like it is getting time to run the tool again. Unless there’s something else going on, that is….
- Date: 2007/07/16
- Article: Google AdWords, Click Fraud and gclid
This article about Google, AdWords, Click Fraud and gclid usually shows up fairly high in searches for “gclid“. Every so often, I check that search, not just to see whether the article is still ranking, but to see if anyone else has written anything interesting about that tracking parameter recently. What did I see yesterday, when I looked? I was, FWIW, thinking about call tracking systems – not just vanity, honestly!
OK, so how many times is “gclid” mentioned on that Crucial Memory page? Never. What about the Tax Credits page? Nope. Not there, either.
So, why were these pages regarded as important for users to know about, when they search for gclid?
Interesting puzzle, isn’t it? If you can solve it, let me know… I just might have a job for you!
Oh, and see if you can work out what the connection is between SEO By The Sea’s recent blog article about dates in snippets, and this article. It’s a little test that I’m doing – but of what?