While searching the Internet today I found a blog post about the SEOmoz Community that I wish I had seen back in March.

As excited as I was to find such a glowing comment it gave me a moment of pause. Why didn’t I see this 5 months ago? I primarily use my username for doing query string tests, so I search inflatemouse 3-5 times per week — but I never saw this particular article. So I started looking for it, it was on page 3 of the results. I am appalled that I wasn’t searching that deep. I started playing with the query, excluding powerful sites that I have a presence on, and it still only made it to page two.

I went on to check a few more engines including Technorati, Serph, and a new site I have learned about Wink.

So this offers an interesting lesson in how deep you have to go to, more or less, hide information on the Internet. For many people, especially the average searcher, page 3 might as well not exist.

Another find was the huge amount of replication that was allowed in Google’s results. Eight unique domains in the top ten, twelve unique domains in the top twenty. In fact four of the top twenty are RSS feeds of content from a site in the top ten. It seems an industrious person could bury content by finding highly spammed blogs.