Wordtracker Update

New Headline: Overly worked search-engine-slave sees smoking gun when what really was there was more of a foggy-brand-strategy.

This morning I was contacted, via email, by both Mike and Andy Mindel. Mke is Managing Director at Wordtracker - Andy's title is not indicated in his sig file.

As I stated in my original post, I was hoping I was wrong. To some degree I was.

In the drop down menu for the "keyword universe" section of the site, there is the option to search Overture instead of the Wordtracker Metacrawler partners. Although, I did not choose this option, and had never used this before, it appears the search defaulted to this. OK. I accept that. Weird ghost in the machine stuff happens to all of us.

The only thing that continues to bug me about this is how badly Wordtracker bags on Overture results as being "overly inflated" and stating "This is why we will always use metacrawlers as the results will never be distorted in this way".

Yet, Mike wrote to me the following...

"Our clients find that collecting keywords via Overture using the Wordtracker interface is a great timesaver. They often like to compare the numbers between Overture and Wordtracker as this gives them a better guide. In fact it's been this way for 7 years since we started in 1998".

Final Note: If Overture data are really this terrible, it seems an odd strategy to offer access to it on your platform. At the very least, offering it appears as a passive endorsement in direct conflict with your formal position statements.

Thanks for the response.