Welcome to the Q&A Forum

In Webmaster Tools, you can "fetch as google bot" meaning you can enter one of those 77 URLs, and see what the Google "bot" sees when going to that URL.

You can also use:

http://www.dnsqueries.com/en/googlebot_simulator.php

For the URL: http://www.in2town.co.uk/Entertainment-Magazine

the Google Bot Simulator says:

HTTP CODE = HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently

Location = http://www.in2town.co.uk/Showbiz-Gossip

and for: http://www.in2town.co.uk/Weight-Loss-Hypnotherapy-helped-woman-lose-3-stone

HTTP CODE = HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently

Location = http://www.in2town.co.uk/Weight-Loss-Hypnotherapy

Interestingly, both the NEW URLs work fine although http://www.in2town.co.uk/Weight-Loss-Hypnotherapy doesn't look too good (at least in my web browser) but that's another issue.

You have a fairly complex .htaccess file (hint: I looked up your OLD .htaccess file - you should delete old htaccess files or something so people can't access them via a web browser), so I'm guessing the problem will be within your .htaccess file.

If possible, put a plain and simple .htaccess file on, test it with Google Webmaster Tools and see if the error still persists.

Adam

If it ever happens again, rush to you client and demand a bonus... before Google fixes it!

Hi all,

This is a question about whether the top 10 ORGANIC Google results for a broad match is your competition, or whether it's the top 10 for a phrase match, or an exact match.

I'm a newbie here but not a newbie to the world of SEO. I hope to be able answer just as many questions as I ask

QUESTION: If a customer comes to me and says, "hey, who's my (organic) competition for wedding present?" and I want to use Google to get the top 10 organic results, do I use a broad, phrase, or exact match?

It seems many people think an exact match is the way to go but I think they were more referring to Adwords results / competition. I'm not trying to determine search volume for Adwords or even the search volume for organic results... I'm only interested in the top 10 competitors in the organic results.

No one types in "wedding present" (with inverted commas" when doing a search in Google, so surely to see who ranks organically for wedding present I'd want to simply type in wedding present (no inverted commas, aka broad match).

I understand all the concepts about how Google results cary whether you're logged in, etc, etc so I don't want to get distracted by that. And I know there's a bunch of tools we can use like the SEOMoz Keyword Analysis Tool. But I just want to know specifically what people would use (broad, phrase or exact) to look at the top 10 organic competitors are when doing a manual search in Google.

Hi Darcy,

I'm going through a process at the moment of a very thorough analysis of every tool I can get my hands on - more from a technical perspective because I was getting sick of the varying results from different tools / utilities.

I wrote my own scraper utility to get live results from Google as well. I tested 800 keywords using broad, phrase, exact, etc and the results from Google compared to every tool out there is different.

I'm currently writing a document on all of this. Maybe I should post it somewhere, I don't know, but my strong feelings at this point is:

• check with each provider (of the online tool or downloadable software) whether they use broad match, phrase match, or exact match. SEM Rush displays results for "phrase match" but shows [exact match] search volume for that phrase. You almost need a database to remember what criteria each tool uses to return results.

• do they allow you to filter results by domain (google.com, google.com.au, etc)?

• in addition to the above, do they allow you to filter results by only showing results for that country (eg, if you can select "Australia", do they search on google.com.au AND give you the choice to see results for only .com.au domains, or all results that google.com.au would offer up?)

• How recent is their data? Everything costs money - whether it's in API units from Google, API units from a competing tool, or even time and money spent on writing their own scraping software. Free tools aren't going to update their databases every day. SEOMoz (who I've found to be quite accurate) updates their Keyword Analysis Tool database monthly. A lot can happen in 4 weeks. Getting this information can be tough. You need to email each vendor and get their answer - and then trust their answer.

• Tough one... but how savvy is the developer of the tool? I've written my own tools and it's damn hard to get accurate data even from Google directly! There's so many variables. Poorly written software returns poor results. In writing my own stuff, different proxies would return different Google results, even different user agents (web browsers) would return different results. You need a thorough understanding of the technicalities behind obtaining data from or about Google.

There's a few considerations off the top of my head. As I say I'm still putting together my findings. I'm using this reply as an opportunity to hopefully spark a little discussion on this as I think many people have the same problem.

The immediate solution? Write your own software, or use a few tools and average the results. I'm quite the analyst so varying results do my head in. However at the same time, is your goal to get 100% accurate results, or get a good "feel" for the competitive landscape and move on? Sometimes I like to get things perfect, other times my client doesn't have the time to wait, and I'm not paid enough to be that anal!

Hi Dana,

Very strange, I am just reading your blog post now and here you are answering my question. Thanks for the quick reply.

I agree the definition of "competitor" will vary. My question was asked with the definition of "competition" to be anyone taking up a position on the first page because if all 10 positions for shure microphones are taken up by major suppliers / manufacturers then the recommendation to my client would be "don't bother".

What I'm finding with varying tools (SEO Moz, SEM Rush, etc) is they all give search volumes in terms of phrase or exact matches. But when someone searches for wedding present in Google (as a broad match), the number of results is the number of results we care about.

I'm simply not confident in my own opinion because I would have thought all these tools would have put in enough research to decide that phrase or exact results are better. Using a phrase or exact match to provide "search volume" figures makes sense to me, but if you want:

• the top 10 organic / paid results for a keyphrase

• the number of organic / paid results for a keyphrase

Then broad match would be the obvious choice.

I'm not sure if anyone from SEOMoz wants to explain why the Keyword Analysis Tool shows results using exact match, but I'm sure there's a logical reason for it - I just can't see it!

Being new here I'm pressing all sorts of buttons and breaking things...

I posted a question, liked someone's answer so click "good answer" thinking it was like a "thumbs up" but it actually set my question to "answered".

How does one set their own question to un-answered?

Ah so people get points?! I'll have to research what they do but don't worry Dana, the points you shall keep!

But yes, a good feature would be to be able to set a question to unanswered.