a) how clever the person is to have got their site on page 1 of Google for it’s keyword when there are 43,087 competing pages, or

b) telling you to look for a keyword that has fewer than, say, 50,000 competing pages.

Have you ever stopped to ask yourself how accurate that number is that Google quotes you at the top of the search results?  Do you blindly believe that there really are 43,087 competing pages?

I regularly say in forums that these results are meaningless – and wrong.  Here’s what happened just a few minutes ago when I was searching for links to a website that I run.  This particular site – www.itsbeennicked.co.uk – gets interest from the press and I was adding a page to the site with links to articles that have been run about us by newspapers and magazines.

I entered this search term into Google – “itsbeennicked.co.uk”.  Notice that I used quotation marks so that Google actually searched for sites containing the link, rather than just taking me to the site.

Here is a screenshot of the part of the first page of results:

Google tells me there are 49,400 results.  Are there really?  I scrolled to the bottom of the page and clicked to go to page 10

At the foot of page 10, I could suddenly see only 14 pages.  I clicked to go to page 14.  At the foot of page 14, this is what I saw:

Suddenly there are only 138 results instead of 49,400.  What happened to the other 49,262 results?  If I click the bit that invites me to repeat the search and include the omitted results, will I get the rest of the results?

What do you think will happen?

Here’s what did happen:

There are now 62 pages of results.  With 10 results on each page, that adds up to 620 results.  A staggering 48, 280 fewer.  Or, to put it another way, the number of results claimed by Google is a mind boggling 7,780% more than actually appear.

Let’s try that again with something else.  Let’s try “how to lose weight fast” (a good keyword if you are an internet marketer in the weight loss niche).  This time, I’m not going to use the quotation marks.  I’ll do the search just as a potential reader would do it, using Google.

Here it is:

Google claims 158,000,000 results.  Frightening if you are thinking of designing a niche to target that keyword.  Now I’ll click through to the end.Now there are actually only 815 results.  Not so scary if you need to research the competition.  What will I get if I repeat the search with the omitted results?  Here we are:

It takes me to page 100.  With 10 results per page, that’s 1000 results.  The original number claimed by Google (158 million, yes, Million) is a totally staggering 15,800,000 percent higher than the actual results.  Yes, Google claims fifteen MILLION percent more results than there actually are.

(disclaimer, I’m not sure about the maths here, I might need to double check it, but you get the point!)

There are lots of free pages on this site with “how to’s” and general hints and tips. There are also tutorials for sale and software for sale.

If you have any suggestions for additions to the site or tutorials that you would like me to write, email me on help(@)it-teacher.co.uk.

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