This test was actually about something else but while examining the results, Dori found something really strange that may affect future tests using alpha- numeric keywords or content. She found that Google does not show results for some search queries. This is discussed on this test.
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This was an accident test and I'm going to drop the manhole cover and do a carpe diem. This was an accident test. She was actually going through, preparing for this and found some weird craziness that was going on with this in particular site.
I just wanted to see or she dove into a lot deeper looking at these because, obviously, she's got and her ~ got a crazy amount of site sitting up there, getting ready for indexing or just sitting there ready for someone to use for testing and etc and in this one she rolled back on a previous test and she's looking at it and she's noticed that this keyword here, if you look at it, blablabla. It is a random alpha.
It is how much that describe and there's numbers of etc thrown in there. When she searched for it even an exact match it didn't bring it up but when she actually used the site and search for it then Google burned all up which is really weird.
So, clearly Google knows that the website is there, that keyword is there and that page is in that keyword. So, if it's an exact why when that come up and then she... There's another one. This is just in lorem ipsum, exact match search. No results found for it but using the site there it is. It's clearly there and clearly Google knows it's there. So, what is going on? I guess there could be some other theories behind it but it's weird that they're not doing that.
Her idea is maybe this is Google's way of fighting against testers which is a reasonable assumption. There's plenty of people that think Google hates SEO and they're changing everything and trying to find ways to diminish SEOs but... And this could be or it could be an accidental thing.
It could be a result of BERT and BERT is being employed in the search query. That's a theory of mine but if BERT is employed in the search query and now we're giving it some random craziness and we just threw BERT a monkey wrench. So, BERT now is now ernie. what? So, that could be what's going on there too.
There is Dori's one conclusion: the testers. Then, she might think it could be an editorial control. So, the quality of the search query – the quality of that query versus the search results. If your query sucks maybe we're going to give you bad or no results. That's pretty interesting too.
I would go and look at your testing sites and see if this is still something that might be affecting you. See if we can duplicate it and then we have to actually come up with better conclusions as to why it's there. It's easy to be in the tinfoil hat crowd and say, "oh, they're going after testers." because it's not like anyone's hidden that people are using lorem ipsum to isolate variables and then now there's random alpha and in this case it's random alpha and numerical sequences. So, certainly worth playing with and trying to discover.
The reason this is important is you want to... If we want to call something a factor you have to have something that's tested or a method that's tested in isolation. So, with a single variable you're going to know whether it's a fact or not. You're not necessarily going to know how strong of factor it is but you're going to know it's a factor.
Then, you get into a leaderboard process and you can compare one factor versus another and estimate strength and then you do real world testing and see how that stacks up when you start throwing in all those other variables into it. So, I would just... This is definitely something to keep an eye on. If you're doing your own test sites look at your pages and see if they're coming up for anything else and see if it affects you. Dori knows it's there now so she should be testing all of our stuff a whole lot more.