Search Engine Saturation - WTF is that?

I stumbled upon this term recently while I was asked to evaluate a questionnaire for hiring SEO Candidates for one of my friends. My first reaction was who the hell uses that term today? So I did a bit of research to find out more about Search Engine Saturation.

 

Apparently, whoever coined this term and the definition is a big dufus, or no one around has a proper idea what that concept is. I suspect some moron just came up with that terminology so that he can make a mumbo jumbo tool out of it and fool more SEO fools out there. Basically ’search engine saturation is a metric that gives you an idea how many pages of your website are indexed on a?particular?search engine.

 

So, If I say your Search engine saturation on Google is 208 that would mean 208 pages of your site are indexed by Google. You can see this by typing ’site:yourdomainname’ in the google search box. Similarly we can have Search Engine Saturation for Bing, Yahoo, Ask etc.

Now, lets see what is this fuss about?

Why can’t one simply say number of pages indexed? Search Engine Saturation is a confusing concept in this situation. Can any one see what does Saturation signify here when we are measuring a number that could be anything. Only in one instance did I see the usage of % to convey this metric.

It actually makes more sense when you say my Google Search Engine Saturation is 80%. Which would mean 80 percentage of my pages have been included on Google’s index. So 100% saturation would mean all your pages are indexed. I am not a huge fan of using industry cliche in my SEO reports, so I will resist all urges of using this term to further confuse my would be clients. I would prefer saying :

Now, lets see what is this fuss about?

• Total number of pages on website : 100 (source : Xenu Link Sloth)
• Pages indexed on Goolge : 78 (source : Google)
• Pages indexed on Bing: 48 (Source: Bing)

rather than saying: 

• Google Search Engine Satruation : 78
• Bing Search Engine Saturation : 48 (and waste another hour at this link to find out what on earth is search engine saturation)

Bottom line of this write up -Keep it Simple, silly.