Overture’s keyword research tool is an invaluable part of many independent web publisher’s daily lives. Early on I recognized that Overture had some problems. I would regularly come across high-volume key phrases that clearly originated from one source.

There are two occasions where it is very obvious: streams of irregular characters and very specific phrases getting more searches than they should.

After realising that I had used invalid information to build a site, I started using Wordtracker in addition to Overture. Neither is perfect, but together they work very well. By comparing two lists of results you can usually pick out what should not be there.
Here is where this could become a larger problem, what if someone decided to employ an army of bots to intentionally skew these results? Getting a clear picture of who is searching for what could suddenly become very difficult. Running PPC could give marketers a clue about whats going on, but when researching thousands keywords that is simply unrealistic, or at the very least very costly.

In my new book on blogging (coming out soon!) I discuss both this topic and disinformation on a broader scale. The simple fact is you need to take everything you hear and read with a grain of salt, be it keyword research or forum postings.