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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:
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:
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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