More Caveats for the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool

Posted by Josh on Monday, June 5th, 2006.

Today I was conducting some keyword research on specific health topics, and I was collecting data from the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool. As noted in previous posts, the tool’s stemming can result in significant ambiguity. Another big problem is that the data comes from Yahoo’s search network which Search Engine Marketers like us often request search engine rankings for our clients’ keywords. Sometimes our activity (alone or collectively) can signficantly sway the numbers. Here is an example:

Searches done in April 2006
23140	autoimmune disease glyco.com
12645	autoimmune disease
716	autoimmune disease symptom

How likely is it really that people are searching on some form of “autoimmune disease glyco.com”? Are there really twice as many as those searching on “autoimmunce disease”? This is either a rather significant bug or someone in the month of April 2006 was running a huge number of such queries on the Yahoo network.