yes, we’re on the case with this and the work should be complete fairly soon.

In terms of your accuracy question – it’s a slightly difficult one to answer directly. No keyword research tool (even the ones delivered from major search engines for PPC research) can deliver results that can be described as pin-point accurate. There’s no ‘gospel truth’ available to SEMs

Any tool used for keyword research is intended as a guide. We do recommend to all of our users (whether for the free or subscription tools) that it’s better to look at the relationships between the keywords rather than the raw numbers themselves (although the numbers, particularly the competition figures, do give a deeper insight) – it gives a much clearer overview – and that applies to using any KW research tools, not just ours.

In terms of Wordtracker’s accuracy, though, we have a representative sample of US searches that thousands of customers and free tool users have found helpful over the years.

I haven’t spent a huge amount of time recently researching other platforms, but I do know that many of them rely on data from Google AdWords, which, while it’s useful in many respects, has a heavier emphasis on PPC research than organic search, which is where Wordtracker’s strength emerges, particularly in terms of providing access to the long tail of organic search – the very language that real people use to find solutions to their web questions, be that as part of a buying cycle, or just a search for information.

Do let us know if you have any other questions.

All the best,

Mal

Hi Mal. Thanks for letting us know you are cleaning up this spam from WordTracker results. How would you say your accuracy compares to other platforms out there?

I’m Mal and I work with Wordtracker.

It’s certainly an interesting set of keywords you’ve found here – and you’re right, it’s clearly spam. Deeper analysis shows that it’s largely the same string of text that’s being used, prefixed by a different word each time.

We do have a ten-stage filtering process which is remarkably effective at removing most spam, but it is true that sometimes things do slip through. We’re not able to manually test every keyword that comes through our system, so it’s a good thing that we have diligent users who let us know when situations like this do arise.

It’s worth mentioning, however, that while SEO Blogger (the free tool you’re working with) is affected by this, our subscribers are able to easily filter out these offending keywords and still have just under 1,600 search terms available to assess.

The phrases you’re seeing in the database are there as a result of someone external to Wordtracker setting up a script and pointing it at the keyword entry field of one of our partner search engines and the keywords the script is using being passed on to us. The likelihood of it being the result of a virus in our own data chain can be ruled out through our own monitoring and analysis services.

I’ll be looking at cleaning these phrases from the database – it’s an unusual set of unwanted keywords, and it’s rare to come across a niche that’s so heavily spammed – this could easily have happened over the course of a couple of hours.

In terms of your comment about search volumes not comparing across different tools, this is normal and to be expected – every keyword research tool (including Google’s) uses a sample of data, and so those samples will vary from tool to tool. As you’re undoubtedly aware, they’re there to provide insight and guidance rather than gospel truths about search behaviour – so you’re exactly right to use multiple data sources for comparison.

Do feel free to contact us directly if you have any other questions about this – you can reach us at support@wordtracker.com

All the best,

Mal