After years of anecdotal evidence and speculation, Google has finally confirmed what many suspected… that the #10 spot in the search results isn’t actually that bad of a place to be.
At SMX West yesterday, Paul Haahr was talking about the Google search results from an engineering perspective, and he dropped some interesting tidbits about the search results and positions. He revealed that the #10 spot in the Google search results actually sees more clicks than the results in positions #8 and #9 combined.
Haahr revealed that people hate having to go through to a second page of search results, so that #10 result is actually clicked significantly more, almost like a last resort click to actually see some content versus more results.
But what about position #7? It actually does better than position #10. So there is a limit on the “how high in the rankings does a site need to be before it outranks #10.
While this interesting tidbit isn’t exactly actionable, since it would be difficult to try and rank #10 if you are sitting at #8 or #9. And people want to be ranking much nearer to the top, which would counter this kind of situation.
Position 10 gets more clicks than 8 and 9 together. No one wants to click next page. But 10 is worse than position 7. @haahr #smx
— Jennifer Slegg (@jenstar) March 3, 2016
Jennifer Slegg
Latest posts by Jennifer Slegg (see all)
- New Google Quality Rater Guidelines, Update Adds Emphasis on Needs Met - October 16, 2020
- Google Updates Experiment Statistics for Quality Raters - October 6, 2020
- Analyzing “How Google Search Works” Changes from Google - July 8, 2020
- Google Quality Rater Guidelines Update: New Introduction, Rater Bias & Political Affiliations - December 6, 2019
- Google Updates Quality Rater Guidelines: Reputation for News Sites; Video Content Updates; Quality for Information Sites - September 13, 2019