I have just discovered something quite DISTURBING about Google

After all my years of marketing on the internet I am shocked at what I have just discovered! I never thought about punctuation making a difference to the results in big G. This is my story...

I have spent the last two and a half days working on getting a new page listed for an affilliate product I am selling. It went from non existant on Thursday to page 4 of G. I kept SEOing and by Thursday night I had hit #1 in Google out of 2,500,000 others. I was ahead of #2 wikipedia and #3 ezinearticles.

About 1 hr later I checked to see if the listing had moved any and it sure had. I was not #1 anymore, I wasn't even on the first page, but now on page 8. I thought, ok here goes the famous google dance. Friday morning I checked and I was now on page 7 and stayed there.

I didn't work on it during Saturday but checked again on Saturday night and I was now #2 on page 1 right after the OP of the product I was marketing, with Wikipedia and Ezinearticles after me once again.

Upon waking up this morning, Sunday, I checked my sales and had not had one hit, much less a sale. I checked and I was in the #1 position once again. A few seconds later I did the search again to see how many competing pages there were. I was shocked, within a few seconds, I was back on page 8.

Then I realized the first search when I came up #1 I used all lower case letters, when I searched with proper capitalization I come up on page 8. I tested my theory and sure enough those were the results.

So how do other people search? Should I always capitalize or what? I never thought punctuation mattered. Have I been missing out on sales all these years due to capitalization? I don't know what I should do from here on. Obviously the lower case gives me better listings but considering the amount of visitors the keyword tools show for the term and the fact that I have not had one hit, not one sale, it seems people must be searching with capitalization.

Any thoughts on this?

 

I just briefly tried this theory and I come up w/ same results regardless of capitalization. Could you post the specific queries you tested this with?

 

i always use lowercase mainly because when i search for stuff myself i never use caps

 

i dont think the vast majority uses caps when searching, but I've heard many times of people not getting traffic when by theory they should be.

 

Tied it too.. nothing happened....

 

Results do vary , but this is a lot of variation , i havnt seen websites dancing from page 1 to page 8...
Dancing usually happens when search engine is trying to determine its position.
I think you should give it some time , or check in google webmaster to check number of impression , number of times your website is shown on google and number of clicks you are getting (CTR).

 

I always use lower case when searching as many people prob. do. Surprised you arent getting traffic. How often is youre niche or key word phrase searched for?

 

Try logging off from your Google Account then search the kw again.

 

No difference for a couple of my sites.

 

Use a different browser and log out of Google... it always happens to me, Google gives back different results depending on what I searched before.

 

huh strange thing but i m 100% sure there are quite a few peoples used CAP in search query !!

 

delete all your cookies and such, but most of these things are just coincidence you know, these google bastards are such crazy sons of bitches always changing everything, it's easy to find patterns in pure coincidences
capitalization would make sense in some rare cases though, like FOX and fox perhaps, one's a broadcasting company and one's a stupid animal
i vote on coincidence though

 

man.. from page 1 to 8, its just way to off

 

I hate to say what it is that I am promoting but since I am not getting any hits or any sales I guess it wont make any difference. I am promoting a clickbank product, the FFLkit. The page is a classified ad which then links back to my affiliate site which is cloaked to the original.

The search term is get ffl and according to the keyword program I use, it gets 217 searches per day. Not alot but I should be getting some clicks through to my site I would think. So far not one.

When searching - get ffl - I come up #2 page one.

Then search - Get ffl - or Get FFL either way I am now at page 7 last listing.

This being such a huge difference it makes me wonder what the best action would be. I always figured caps made no difference.

 

I use firefox, but I just tried IE and I get the same results.

 

No difference in results for "get ffl" or "Get FFL". Number two in my search is ezine articles for both searches. I use USA proxy. I think your cookies or IP are the problem for the different results. I tried caps for my keywords and I see no difference for any search.

 

Just an FYI that I tried it from Canada and my results are the exact same either way.

Good luck figuring this out.

Cheers,
Peter

 

I've had some pages I was trying to rank for do the same before. I actually had the opposite problem where I had used proper capitalization and was not ranking for all lowercase.

It danced around like this for a few days then is fixed itself and was fine. I wouldn't worry about this.

And I still continue to use proper capitalization and everything is fine.

 

capitalization doesn't matter, but punctuation does when used in quotes or when used with other punctionation (eg: read more... vs read more.)

 

It Does matter but it only matters here:

http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en

Example:

http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en#hl=en&q=You+win&aq=f&aqi=g10&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&fp=81802d711b9df3e9
http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en#hl=en&q=you+win&aq=f&aqi=g10&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&fp=81802d711b9df3e9

Your backlinks structure have not effect as much as I know.

Not new..