On this blog and on Visual Website Optimizer’s blog, we get a lot of long tail search visitors. The term long tail is borrowed from power-law like distributions, wherein a small number of elements make up for the most volume while a large number of different elements make up for lesser volume. The latter one is called “long tail” and here is how it looks:

You see I love Split Testing blog is all about (duh) split testing. And I expect search engines to send to the blog people looking for things related to split testing. Of course, a bonus for us, search engines can also send visitors looking for related topics such as SEO, online marketing, web analytics, etc. However, some of the visitors we get from Google were searching for completely different things. Sample some of the following keywords where our blog is apparently ranked highly on Google:

• conversion statistics rodents of unusual size
  (whoa! Why would Google rank our blog for this term? Why would someone search it in the first place?)
• world optimizer
  (So, now VWO can optimize the world too?)
• Enjoy a bit of downtime
  (Google, you should read and understand this)
• why do you split 8s
  (I have no idea what this means)
• excuses for not performing well
  (We do A/B testing, not self help book publishing)
• VISUAL SITE HACKER
  (a potential startup idea!)
• can you have the same website at two different URLs
  (a honest question for sure, but “A/B testing” would have actually scared this visitor)
• bouncing sidebar
  (Google probably mixed up bounce rate, and sidebar case studies)
• how can I give feedback to their ideas
  (may be first try A/B testing your feedback on other people?)

The point of this post isn’t to belittle Google’s job. It is a fantastic search engine and does amazingly job in long term searches. The humorous queries above constitute <2% of total search volume we get.

But, still, it is always good to see such queries in web logs. Makes up for a good laugh. Plus, gives a room for improvement in (now) slow-moving search industry.

Tags: ab testing, google, long tail, multivariate, organic, search
Posted in SEO on May 22nd, 2010 | 6 Comments »