Do Popups Affect Ranking?
by Jon Ricerca
http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com
Someone
from our membership site recently asked "Do Popups Affect
Ranking?" My gut instinct was "How could they?"
and "Why would a search engine care whether your site used
popups or not?"
Then,
I thought "Well; if the search engines do pay any attention
to popups, they probably rank them lower due to quality issues."
However, since it was a member of our site asking the question,
I decided to run it through our statistical analysis engine. Wow!
What a surprising result!
Here
is the methodology I used to answer this question. I gathered
the results of the queries naturally performed last month by myself
and three associates using Yahoo and Google.
I
then visited each page and kept a tally of pages that used the
javascript "window.open" command (a very common way
to implement popups). The tally was kept for each of the first
eight rankings for each of the two largest search engines (Yahoo
and Google).
On
the Y-axis, you will see the number of pages found that use a
javascript "window.open" command. On the X-axis, we
have rankings from 1 to 8.
Here
are the graphs for Yahoo and Google:
Yahoo doesn't seem to care very much about use of the "window.open"
command. However, the trend is positive. Pages with the "window.open"
command did rank higher on average than pages without it.
The
Google result was absolutely amazing though! The correlation
was an amazing +92 on a scale of -100 to +100. Pages which used
the "window.open" command ranked much higher in an extremely
consistent manner than pages that did not use the "window.open"
command.
Is
it possible (likely?) that Google actually does use this as a
ranking factor? Why? We may never know, but now we do know that
pages that implement popups using the "window.open"
command do rank higher on average on Yahoo and MUCH higher consistently
on Google.
Notes:
1.
Over 1,000 queries and over 10,000 sites were examined for this
study.
2.
There was no exercise to attempt to isolate different keywords.
I merely took a random sampling of the queries performed by myself
and three associates during the prior month.
Conclusion:
Pages
using the javascript "window.open" command rank higher
on both of the leading search engines (Yahoo and Google).
This
is merely a correlation study, so it cannot be determined from
this study whether the leading search engines purposefully entertain
this factor or not. The actual factors used may be far distant
from the factor we studied, but the end result is that both of
these search engines do, in fact, rank pages with a "window.open"
command higher on average.
Jon Ricerca is one of the leading researchers and
authors of the Search Engine Ranking Factor (SERF) reports at SearchEngineGeek.com.
For access to the other SERF reports, please visit: http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com
