what is googletestad?

Everybody wants to know what it means. It always turns up on the most searched queries for Overture, MSN, Yahoo and other search engines. Some people speculate that it has something to do with Google's Adwords program, and Google's engineers use it to test their pay per click advertising. If you type googletestad into the search box at google, you will see this ad at the right of the SERPS:

or sometimes you will see this ad at the top of the SERPs

.

Clicking on this ad takes you to search results page with the words family safe entered into the search box , and webpages that are about family safe sites.

Some people speculate that it may have something to do with Adsense, where an adsense marketer is demonstrating a niche word to prospective customers, to show how to corner a particular keyword.

Another theory is that it is a tool for a Search Engine Optimisation company who wants to show their future clients that they can 'climb to the top' in search engine rankings for a particular word no matter how obscure.

Some people have even said that googletestad is some kind of free software which will get you to the top of search engines for free! I'm sure that we would all know if that existed!

My personal theory is that googletestad IS just a test ad for Google, however it makes a great irrelevant term to test out different SEO methods because if that keyword is removed for any reason it won't cause a problem for you.

Some people try and sneak in Adwords ads for the keyword googletestad, such as the ads below which appeared on the 21st of February 2006 (these were all for 1 website):

Adwords ads such as these are always quickly deleted by Google as nobody but Google seems to be allowed to use that keyword as a trigger.

From wikipedia:

In June 2005, googletestad began appearing increasingly in the top search terms for search engines such as Yahoo! Search Marketing. and WordTracker.

In July 2005 this keyword was consistently in the top 30 searches as measured by WordTracker, and received over 100,000 searches according to Yahoo! Search Marketing thus:

* 72,161 searches - google googletestad monitor query
* 39,436 searches - googletestad
* 96 searches - foo google googletestad monitor query

The WordTracker Keywords Report dated August 9, 2005 (top 10 queries from the last 48 hours) reported:

* 1 jessica simpson (3377)
* 2 jessica alba (3314)
* 3 music lyrics (2679)
* 4 daniela hantuchova (1955)
* 5 paris hilton (1469)
* 6 playstation 2 cheats (1243)
* 7 xbox cheats (1231)
* 8 jokes (1069)
* 9 googletestad (1048)
* 10 google (1013)

Regarding the keyword's trend, back issues of that service's Top 200 long-term keyword report (for the last 110 days) showed gaining popularity:

(date - rank, and count)

* August 9, 2005 - 55 (35,032)
* August 2, 2005 - 64 (32,737)
* July 26, 2005 - 94 (28,793)
* July 19, 2005 - 105 (24,878)

As of August 13th 2005, there were 12,800 hits found for googletestad in Google's search engine.
As of February 9th 2006, there were 135,000 hits found for googletestad in Google's search engine! Seems like everyone is getting on the bandwagon!
Update! 25th of February 2005 there are a staggering 336,000 results when searching for our keyword!!