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Do Popups Affect Ranking?
Article by Jon Ricera
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:
http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com/graphs/dey04.gif
Note to
webmasters: Feel free to hot link to the above graphs or
even copy them to your own site. (Also
feel
free to delete
this note.)
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
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