Research for a new site about Jails, Prisons and Inmates has us doing searches all day and night, but when looking up a new county, results often include the words I WANT to see, not words that are REALLY THERE at the destination.

After running a few thousand searches for the same subject, the biggest change noticed is title manipulation. Don't know if there's a technical term, but when searching for something, they showed me what I wanted to see, not what was really there. Over the last month or so, Rumors, Speculation and a Spark of Truth have been seen hanging out all over the web discussing Google and the new search features and behaviors. Another change with Google search include what's called real time search. Without going into what that is, I'll tell you what I've seen it do, an article by Jennifer Horowitz of eComBuffet on real time search gives the important details, but basically, Google has been tracking our habits and studying them to appeal to users more.

How is it? It's deceptive. While the Sheriff of "Coleman County" might operate a Jail, but doesn't have a page about it or himself or inmates or his job title. Google sure shows a page or two with "Jail", "Sheriff" or "Inmates" in the link. It wasn't until doing a few extra searches that it was noticed they must be using synonyms because a small number of the sites (real and made up) didn't even have the key words occurring in them...ANYWHERE. To it's credit, it must be said we were almost forcing Google to tell us what we wanted to hear at gunpoint.

Can you trust this article? No more than any others, judge for yourself, we did. The research work can be seen at http://www.countyjailinmatesearch.net, you can decide if that's enough searching to form an opinion. You can test this, but there are no guarantees. Our browsers are in, on and around very specific subjects and connect with Google in several ways during the process, through ads and tracking, so we see the effects more than the causal surfer and you would almost expect this, just not from Google. As far as being a marketer and SEO fanatic, it seems that genuine effort and relevant content are still what's being served up on the whole, so why not just build better sites for people and let Google do what they do, send traffic to relevant sites.

Keep it Str8!

How outside content is managed has shown influence over users with trackable results in both pageviews and lead generation. These sites all pull traffic from other key phrases, the busiest are realfreesearches.net and str82u.net, traffic is over 100,000 unique per month with over 200,000 page views. These SEO examples demonstrate consistant query sources, more obscure results are ommited though they make up half of the analyzed information. 1, 2 and 4 are allowed to age using either includes or CMS edditing, #3 is pure html being editted at least bi-weekly.

1. findpeoplefree.net for the phrase "find people free" can be found at http://www.google.com/search?q=find+people+free

2. freeaddresslookup.net for the phrase "free address lookup" can be found at http://www.google.com/search?q=free+address+search
and using the phrase "free address lookup" http://www.google.com/search?q=free+address+lookup
and again using "free address lookup" at Yahoo! http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=free+address+lookup

3. str82u.net for the phrase "people in jail" http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=find+people+in+jail
and "find people in jail" http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=find+people+in+jail

4. realfreesearches.net for the phrase "free inmate search" at Yahoo! http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=free+inmate+search
and for the same phrase at Bing http://www.bing.com/search?q=free+inmate+search

Using webmaster tools at Google, simple analytics are collected. Bounce rates are high due to content and design though time on site averages are well over a full minute on site and 2 pages per visit. Return visits average 15% across the network and are a few points higher or lower on individual sites. All these are normal for targetted pages.

Reactions are different, from a marketing aspect, sites with high CTR for text ads don't for the search boxes or interactive features and vice versa on others. This suggests one of two things first, either the form fits in too well and is overlooked or it's too obtrusive and obviously an advertisement. Sites that get more leads have text based ads integrated better alongside themed searchboxes which capture the eye or focus of the median visitor.

I suppose this could be our entry for the contest, but it's not since we aren't trying to push SEO backwards. You can see the registered page in progress at http://str8.us/ as it comes along. The content needed to be fresher than the start date of the contest so it's on a new domain instead. What better way to test skill and "oes tsetnoc" might than doing it from scratch; no backlinks, paid traffic, no nothing. Not to mention effecting the pagerank of any site you are trying to win with.

The competition is fierce, our entry is a little late, coming in about 20 days after starting, so there was no chance to grab a killer domain name, another reason for the str8.us domain name.
Design Ideas: The site itself is going to be .php based, using alot of includes to control certain aspects of the build. Another "trick" that ties in will be rotating most of the content positions. DID YOU CATCH THAT? The template for the pages have over ??? points that call content, including the < head >metatags< /head >,. All of the points are rotator scripts leading to text files with ??? items, some of those being dynamic as well.
No math has be done on this yet. Once everything is solid, it should fun to reveal the total combinations for each page and the site totals. This can't be an original idea, it's actually a trick one one of the network sites to keep the ads fresh, but the results sere that the page APPEARS to have been there for months, but has fresh content when spidered.

If you're game and want to get into the oes tsetnoc contest, DO IT! The prize for number one on the SERP at Google is $1000 and some killer bragging rights. 2nd and 3rd results get big money and pride too, indented results don't count.

Oh, big rule, only ONE page/url from the site can be entered, no multiples. Good Luck!