Simon Cox- Simon Cox
Pludgebanging words into Google
Updated: Mar 7
I was testing out different made up words to see what Google returned.
SEO experiments that no-one really cares about but they do increase the probability of other tests being useful.
Pludgebanger. Every now and again I search for a word on Google that does not exist. Some people create words for their SEO testing and these are normally words that are highly unlikely to be an actual word, such as “ipbepikebf[ojdfv[joa”, else that will spoil the test if it existed elsewhere.
So after getting to know a cheeky Chotes Du Rhone over dinner a word popped into my head — can’t remember what triggered it but these things do happen to me quite a lot — don’t they you? That word was Pludgebanger. I tapped it into Google and inevitably got the screen of despair. No one has anything on the web (worth indexing) with word Pludgebanger in it.
I tried a few other made-up words that sounded as if they could be words, as opposed to nonsense strings of letters:
falapatterfala — same result as pludgebanger
crandgneck — Google starting suggesting other words
krunshplek — again Google suggested other words, was it on to me?
No — I had made-up words with elements of other words in them — Google was trying to guess what I meant and doing a pretty good job of it.
Without context, any algorithm will struggle to provide a useful answer. If I put these words into a context it will try and make sense of what I am asking (I say try — to me it’s trying but to Google it makes no difference).
So I tried ‘pludgebangers of the old west’ — and got some results! Of course, Google had focused in on The Old West as a topic and threw me some results in an attempt to placate me.
Next I tried adding ‘free’ at the start to give a different context — but no it had nothing on that of course.
So I tried adding context on the end, ‘free pludgebanger tools’, and got some more results, none are of any use but it had a go.
Then I tried some numbers: 123456789987654321 This brought back some interesting results but not unexpected.
So I doubled up: 123456789987654321123456789987654321 Different results and all the titles had the numbers in
Doubled up again : (Not putting the numbers now as they break the layout) There were lots of maths-related answers — how to show large numbers etc.
I doubled up again: this time started to get a lot of Russian and Chinese websites
I kept doubling up and found that 128 characters are all Google that will allow in search. That fact is more likely to affect the German language before English. German is precise and stitches words together to provide a fully documented meaning, like a blockchain. English is lazy and will revert to whatever is easiest. I don’t speak German so I stopped experimenting there.
Obviously, I am procrastinating and have work I should be getting on with, as probably have you…