First, let me say I'm sooooo happy to see this forum open up!! :D I've been following Danny's work since waaaay back in 1998 when I bought his book "Getting Hits" (forgive me if that's the wrong title, I don't have it in front of me now) when I worked with Cisco Systems!! Coool!

OK, back to earth. I recognize many of you so please forgive me for posting the same questions on multiple forums, I just can't seem to figure out the exact nature of what's happening with some of Google's search results. (I did get some great suggestions, just looking for more information)

I was researching backlinks for a client and this page showed up (I was just searching on the term www.site.com, not the actual links).

I'm wondering what this page is all about: (attempting to de-link this)
[/url]www.drugs.com/sch/home/br_home/[/url]
It is indexed as a static page in Google, the links stay exactly the same, they don't seem to be dynamic, but if you mouse over them, they are connected to Overture. Will signing up for Overture show ads in these kinds of sites?

Anyone know what this is?

Thanks!
MIDA

I don't think those are counting as any sort of static link or aiding link popularity. I think by signining up for Overture some of your stuff would be included in those pages.

What I do think is funny about that setup is how drugs.com has a bunch of non drug related searches stored that way.

they not only have mesothelioma related popular searches but they also need to go way way outside their industry to try to suck of traffic and profits.

that is greed. big thumbs down for drugs.com

Thanks SEOBook, you've been very patient with all of my questions. ;)
I used the old-fashioned link:www.site.com search and found only 55 links versus 30K. However, when I looked at the first few pages of the 30K+ supposed "mentions" of the URL (which is almost always linked) they were indeed links.

I need to help the client achieve an understanding of how tough it is to go for top rankings when the main competitor is "mentioned" 30K+ times on Google, for example while their site is "mentioned" 35 times.

Now, if many of those "mentions" are a results of Overture ads, somehow being picked up in search results, and they have relatively the same Overture ads, wouldn't you expect to see similar results using the same metric??

Well, I'm grateful for your responses, they have me thinking but I'm not sure I'll be able to explain the situation exactly to the client. The client is very sharp and I get a lot of "how come's" that I am failing to answer. :confused:

Thanks!

you don't get to 30,000 mentions without having at least a few legitimate links.

you can use the 30,000 number as a metric when stating that a link check at google does not show all their results but they have 30,000 mentions in the index.

you can also explain how the backlink check is broken and works to only display a few of the search results to make aritificial ranking manipulation a bit harder.

Google may say their link checking tool is broke for a different reason, but the fact that it can be so handy for SEO's is the reason it is not a priority to fix it in my opinion.

Still curious how all of those Overture "mentions" were indexed - doesn't that seem odd to you? I mean, how does a spider generate and index sponsored results - even if it's only indexing the text on the page. Don't see Google Ads in search results.

I just used the same metric for my client's site and see that now their Overture results were indexed in Google results descriptions, although when I visit the actual pages listed in the Google results, they are not there. Perhaps because they have a much smaller budget and the results are not constant.

Here's the actual search results if you want to see what I mean:
[/url]http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q=www%2Evaluemyhouse%2Ecom+%2Dsite%3Awww%2Evaluemy house%2Ecom[/url]

I also noted that insider.com is responsible for some other odd results but theirs are hard coded URLs. I think they must be an affiliate/spam system, there is no way to learn more about them from their site.

OK, I'm off to bed, maybe I'll work it out in my sleep! :p

Thanks!