Sorry if im missed something here, but... Starting a new site, I obviously had a rough idea of different keywords I could target, so went to quickly compare the competition in Google. I always compare broad and exact matches, the latter ALWAYS being less (obviously). However, now exact matches seem to be yielding MORE results! WTF is going on?? im using the "" for exact matches... has something changed recently?
well i dont know exactly what you mean, but... exact search has always been brackets, quotes are for phrase. you can see it on the match type on the left side of the tool.
Yeah, noted this myself. Excact match search has been bringing up more than the broad search. It threw me for a loop the last couple of days. Where I shook my head, cleared my eyes hahaa. Made no sense to me. Thanks for confirming this! ~Z.
Has it? Well ive been doing it wrong for ages now lol What I mean is to check on Google.com, not in the keyword tool. I always thought it was quotes ?
Hm...maybe it's a relevancy thing? For example, if you search "cookies" (without quotes), there are 252 mil results, but with quotes, there are 313 mil results. So maybe those 252 mil pages actually focus on cookies (in one form or another; baking, computer cookies, etc.), but all 313 mil actually have the word "cookies" in them somewhere.
I'm a bit surprised with this findings. I always knew that broad searches always return more results than exact searches. What would be the good explanation here?
Thats what Broad and Exact means... Broad (without quotes) returns results matching the subject so to speak, whereas Exact (with quotes) returns results ONLY containing that specific keyword or phrase. Therefore exact searches always return less results than broad (since different keywords can be targetted for the same "subject" by different sites).
Yes, but it depends on the length of the keyword, I would think. Have you been testing this with longtail words or just very short ones? So in my example, 252 mil pages are actually about the subject, of course. They could be about baking cookies, cookie eating contests, cookie stuffing, php cookies, etc. However, since it's such a broad word, it makes sense that 313 mil pages have the word "cookies" in them, but only 252 mil pages are about cookies. For example, some kid might have written some blog post about, I dunno, Dragon Ball Z or something, but at the very end he says, "Oh, today I ate cookies." So now his page isn't related to cookies, but it has the word cookies in it, so it would show up in exact search but not broad search.
Well tbh I think its the other way around Anyway, I have never come across exact matches outweighing broad search terms before. But it seems to be happening in Google now, whether single word, phrase, etc. I wonder if this is in part responsible for why people are loosing their serps
Search for Acoustical Ceiling Panels Broad = About 70,100 results (0.14 seconds) Exact = About 326,000 results(0.12 seconds) Why? Another one is 'open cell foam' Broad = About 499,000 results(0.14 seconds) Exact = About 1,330,000 results(0.21 seconds)
ok, my google must be broke, its doing it for like every keyword I put in that I take from google adwords. ughh wtf..
