Let’s just say it’s a quiet afternoon in the office; your minions are taking longer than usual to get their change out of the vending machine, and the door has accidentally locked itself from the inside.
Of course, you could always ring a locksmith, or you could kick back and utilize your downtime by searching for “naked supermodels” on the internet.
Either this is what Justin was up to yesterday afternoon or he’d noticed the term as a referral in our search logs.
You decide.
Anyway, if you do a SERPs check yourself you won’t see the terms appearing anywhere in Google or Yahoo!, but Bing is currently ranking “naked super models” at 6 and “naked supermodels” at 16 (or 6 depending on the way the wind’s blowing) for a tag URL:
http://www.directom.com/internet-marketing-blog/tag/naked-supermodels
Make it Work…
This URL isn’t a post or a page but an archive of one of the many user-generated tags we’ve thrown up on the blog for the sake of additional context.
Wikipedia explains blog tags thusly:
Many blog systems allow authors to add free-form tags to a post, along with (or instead of) placing the post into categories. For example, a post may display that it has been tagged with baseball and tickets. Each of those tags is usually a web link leading to an index page listing all of the posts associated with that tag. The blog may have a sidebar listing all the tags in use on that blog, with each tag leading to an index page. To reclassify a post, an author edits its list of tags. All connections between posts are automatically tracked and updated by the blog software; there is no need to relocate the page within a complex hierarchy of categories.
In other words, it’s a more flexible form of categorization for you blog content that is navigable.
So, Bing is ranking an archived tag page for a reasonably competitive – yet totally unrelated – term pertaining to supermodels in their birthday suits. By clicking on that link you’re only going to find a single post about the WVU eMBA scandal that never mentions naked supermodels or even contains a picture of a clothed one.
So, what if we look at the SERPs results for all the tags Justin originally associated with his post about the WVU eMba scandal:
Download the spreadsheet here.
What we see is Bing has the most tags appearing in searches when you type those exact terms into their search engine, Yahoo! has the second most, and Google the least. (And there’s been no linking to the tag pages other than internally from the bottom of the post.)
We also see other URLs to the one the tags were originally associated with; but that’s the same with all three of the main search engines.
But which set of SERPs from which engine would you prefer? While Bing may offer you more overall terms, Google and Yahoo! are the search engines trying to rank the tags and explicitly match them with the content – it’s more targeted. Bing is ranking the tag URLs irrespective of whether there is matching content.
If you look at the results from a certain SEO angle then it appears you’re getting more bites of the search cherry with Bing. But, as a user I’m getting closer to the information if I’m being sent straight to a relevant page rather than an archived tag page that I may have to spend some time scrolling through in order to get to the same relevant page.
But, what would you think had you come across this site and the above post if you were trawling around looking for naked supermodels?
EXACTLY!
This article has 8 responses
@Paul -
1. Great work – now maybe we can get the top two spots for “naked supermodels”. I’m sure that won’t drive down our time on site at all.
2. Also, in the interest of full disclosure, there was one mention of it in the original text of the post, which clearly is why it is deserving of so lofty a ranking on such a highfalutin’ term:
“The title’s a bit misleading, but good editors will sometimes do that
to draw eyeballs. That’s why this post was almost named ‘Naked
Supermodels Bomb Panda Bear Orphanage.’”
I reckoned to read it for original nude supermodel mentions as well.
But, it’s still wildly out of context and totally irrelevant as a term to rank for.
Boy did my Google Reader send me down the wrong path on this one, LOL…Anyway, I have noticed that Google will index category pages at a pretty decent clip for long tail search terms, but rarely will it index them over a domain name. I’m guessing they would do the same thing for a tag page if your tag page settings allow indexing.
@Jonathan Precisely – all you get is a picture of Tim Gunn, which means I’ve even managed to mix things up further with Project Runway.
Bing seems to be placing the tag URL over and above domains such as supermodels.com – granted, there’s no mention of them being naked, but they’re more closely aligned to the whole supermodel thing than we are.
So title tag + keyword in URL seems to carry more weight than it should from this observation.
That has to be wrong.