Do
Pop-ups Affect Web Page Rank?
Popups and web page
ranking by the search engines
Do Popups Affect
Ranking?
Although many tutorials have
been written on the subject, popups still are a
major discussion among Internet design specialists.
Use them or Not? Take some common sense advice
offered in this web
design lesson.
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
http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com/graphs/deg04.gif
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:
- Over 1,000 queries and
over 10,000 sites were
examined for this
study.
- 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.
---
About the
Author:
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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