Affiliates spend a lot of time trying to understand Google's search results, no matter if you have a site you are trying to build rankings for or if you are a paid search publisher like my self bidding on millions of keywords every day.
Today I ran across some internal screen shots originally posted by Zorgblob (English translated page) and further reported by Vallywag. This is what internal googlers see when they are looking at search results:
So what do these internal fields mean? There has been some speculation about the Adv (Yes | No) field. Vallywag seems to think it might be an internal tool for sales reps to identify and recruit advertisers. I find that highly unlikely. There have been some rumors and speculation in the past about if buying advertising helps your internal search rankings. I have noticed in the past for a friend I was doing search for that before we started his PPC campaign he was showing up as a top local listing for his area hotel, when the PPC started and he got a top PPC listing for his paid ads, these local "on results" listings disappeared. The only thing we could attribute that to was his paid listings.
Google has always said that they are very concerned about the quality of their search results, and don't want one site taking up a majority of the space, my guess is this field helps with that.
I do find it interesting that they appear to be placing some kind of monetary value on the organic listings with the GG Score. I wonder if they look at how much each page of SERPs make and try to balance quality results (getting people to the right information) vs profit per page from ads. I would think that optimizing both would be important for their business.
I also find it very interesting that they are trying to place each ad into a vertical market, almost directory style. Maybe that is how they build the Google Directory (http://directory.google.com/).
People seem to think the PVs field stands for Page Views, I wonder if that is calculating times that listing has been viewed in Google across keyword terms, or times the site has been clicked on?
I think it's odd that the lower ad in the screen shot has lower scores across the board, so these don't appear to be fields that Google is sorting the search results on.
What do you think of these internal numbers? Have you heard anything more?
directory.google.com is, unlike most of Google's products, built by humans, volunteer "editors".
The vertical is, in my own speculation, probably used to place the ad on content pages.
This post: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-10-30-n87.html
claims to have a clarification from Google.
Posted by: Tony Topper | Nov 02, 2007 at 10:04 AM
Thanks Tony! That makes a lot more sense!
Posted by: Adam Viener | Nov 02, 2007 at 10:11 AM