There’s been some talk in the past year of Google results appearing to be case sensitive. The phenomena appeared first in the UK and as of late in US as well. No, I’m not talking about crop circles. I’m surprised that much of this has been brushed off as datacenters or, perhaps, the anchor text of inbound links, as was smartly suggested in a recent Q+A here on the ‘moz.
I was searching Port St. Lucie storage versus port st. lucie storage for a client. There was a bit of disparity. I might be able to chalk this one up to datacenters, but not inbound links, as the ones this site has are only for the company’s name and not the ideal search term. Ok, so no big deal, these particular results might be fluctuating a bit because I did recently optimize a site appearing in the top ten.
Ok, moving on, I was also checking a term for another site. I searched for georgia fire investigation. My recent case sensitive studies led me to want to search for Georgia Fire Investigation.
Well, I’m not sure if this is another datacenter issue, but the disparity between these pages is HUGE, for me, right now this second at least. Georgia Fire Investigation offers 340,000 results whereas georgia fire investigation offers up 2,870,000. I know these numbers shouldn’t mean much but the difference is alarming. The top ten results themselves are also pretty different.
Even if one is searching for Georgia fire investigation (only the state capitalized), they get 340,000 results and not the 2,870,000. Wouldn’t that technically be the correct capitalization for that search, and they receive fewer results?
Is anyone else seeing these kinds of results? Is this something Google is slowly trying to spring on us, despite their official statements? Are we going to have to reexamine every SEO effort we’ve ever attempted with an eye for case sensitivity? Is Google Adwords then going to start giving us case sensitive keyword research options? Ay chihuahua. I look forward to your comments!
