“Googletestad” is:

A. The name of a hit musical about Google set in Eastern Europe.

B. A medicial term for the eyestrain associated with staring at Google for extended periods of time.

C. That weird keyword that keeps showing up at the top of your traffic results but your not really sure why.

If you chose C, not only are you correct – you’re also in good company.

Adam Viener of the Corante blog shares his story of how the unusual term kept appearing on his list of Wordtracker Top 30 keywords of the day.

Viener believes Googletestad actually stands for “Google Test Ad” and that the search engine may be using it to test their AdWords system in a live environment, perhaps as part of some sort of large-scale traffic test.

His post got me going, so I ran few searches of my own. They weren’t incredibly enlightening, despite this site’s promise of “Everything you need to know about the search engine smash hit mystery!”

Most of the search results seem to be sites hiding behind the old bait-and-switch: Is this site more concerned with educating the public about “Googlestad” or Lindsay Lohan? I wonder which one is more profitable? Hmmmm….

If anyone can shed any light, please let us know.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 3rd, 2005 at 11:54 am and is filed under Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.