How important is a front page ranking on a search engine?
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2009-06-09 05:51:51 - Graham Ellis
At the risk of researching and reaching an obvious conclusion (along the lines of "passengers will get upset if their train is delayed and they are not told why", which a half million pound report concluded the other week!), I've spent a few minutes taking a snapshot of old log files to see what proportion of search engine referrals were from links on the second and subsequent pages - on the basis that everyone says (assumes?) that appearing on the first page is critical, but no-one says how critical.
Drum roll ...
Of 14,000 search arrivals analysed, just over 500 were on the second or a subsequent page of results that someone pulled up, leaving 13,500 on the page they initially arrived at. So that's a 27:1 ratio.
Second result page: 283
Third result page: 73
Fourth result page: 46
Fifth result page: 20
Sixth result page: 11
Seventh result page: 7
Eighth result page: 3
And no more that 3 on any subsequent page
Very interestingly, 58 of the 500 or so 'subsequent pages' pointed to the first page, which (from a brief analysis) looks like people clicking back to the first page having visited a later one - the "I wonder what there is further down ... I've found nothing useful after all ... let's go back to that result I found on the first page ..." scenario perhaps?
This is just a snapshot - not scientific enough to be provide any general conclusions. Indeed, further analysis of data over a much longer period showed a 15:1 rather that a 28:1 ratio; an educated guess suggests to me that weekend visitors are more likely to look the second and subsequent pages than weekday ones. But I think there's enough data to say that - for the site which I analysed - front page ranking is indeed very important. Now I just wish I had an easy way of analysing the position on the pgae - what proportion of hits are 'above the fold'!
Drum roll ...