expertc

Hi people,

Yesterday, while researching some names, in the “additional” section of the keyword tool I’ve noticed the [sell cars] combination with 246,000 exacts. It was a bit strange, so I’ve checked trends – it was all OK but… before June 2009 the search volume was almost non-existent and then suddenly in July surged to over 200000 and since then stayed on that level. Well, any high search with word cars should not be ignored, I’ve checked and .eu was available. Better than nothing and I’ve registered it just in case.

The question is, well, people might consider selling their cars and obvious search would be something like ‘how to sell my car”. But what about exacts on “sell cars”? Is a vast majority of population learning how to sell cars? Why such strange surge? Any ideas?

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retired_member13

Any really big "surges" in search volume (apart from things that are seasonal or trendy, eg Meercats, X Factor or Christmas Trees) are generally down to automated queries, either because someone is querying Google repeatedly as part of a site or service, or more likely because someone holds a domain name and wants to make it appear more valuable before selling it on by ramping the search volume.

This is the volume for [sell cars] for the past 12 months:
October 246,000
September 246,000
August 246,000
July 246,000
June 49,500
May 1,300
April 1,300
March 1,300
February 1,300
January 1,300
December 880
November 880

expertc

Thanks Ty_. That what I also thought. But still, even more wierd things... My freshly registered .eu (less than 8 hours!) is already "for sale" on sedo. I haven't parked it there though...

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retired_member13

All this means is that it was previously registered and for sale on Sedo and the owner let it drop. Sedo do registration checks but it's only about every 6 months or so, so it'd take a while for them to flag that the domain was no longer regged and cancel it. This happens quite a lot - I regged quite a few names that are listed on Sedo. If you add it to your Sedo account and go through the verfiy process it'll get added after they check the whois.

expertc

Interesting situation… OK, if someone is pumping-up search volumes it’s up to him. But I always thought that the big G would not tolerate zillions of automated queries and would check IP addresses. Anyway, I will hold on to the domain (for a quid a year it wouldn’t be too difficult) and if nothing happened in a year time – drop it.

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Edwin

There is another big reason why search volumes may increase, and it's something I've been noticing more and more recently: Google Suggest.

Now that Google is throwing out suggestions on every search, and at every stage in the search - even when you do a search in the search box on a search results page, a relatively new change - this can HUGELY affect the traffic to a particular search phrase.

For instance, without Google Suggest there may have been 10 fairly evenly searched keyphrases that are similar keyword combinations. But once Google switched on Suggest, only one of those 10 keyphrases starts to auto-complete as people type, and the other 9 don't show up anywhere. Suddenly, the traffic to that "winning" keyphrase shoots up (and traffic to the other variants dies off).

This can also skew the singular/plural ratio much higher than you might expect. I've seen ratios of 50-to-1 singular to plural, which is significantly more than I remember seeing historically. And if I go back to Google and start looking at the suggestions, it's invariably that Google's suggesting keyphrases beginning with the singular variant.

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retired_member13

It's an interesting idea wrt search volumes, but I don't think it's the reason for this one... this is the autocomplete results given by Google Suggest for typing in "sell ca" - [sell cars] doesn't even get an entry.

expertc

Also interesting: from the above [sell car] should be the top search. But it only gives something like 5,400 exacts. How the suggest tool works, I wonder?

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FagEnd

I noticed this with the google suggest. Killed decent long tail keyword domains overnight