Webmasters and SEOs always try their best to get the top rank for their sites and they continue until they get it and try all old and advanced techniques to get it and I am also not an exception. My question is that is having your site on top rank on major search engines is really best thing in SEO, does a top rank site always have the highest traffic? I think its not true as often I have seen people prefer to go throgh sites that are ranked at two or three or fourth rank and only a few directly go to the site ranked at top. I also often avoid site at the top and click on 2 or 3 ranked site for my query...........So I think having a second or third rank is better than having top rank. What do you think? I just want to know your views about it. Thanks.........
It depends person to person....in my case, I always prefer to click on second or third..not first..I don't know why...
I have 2 competing sites that have the same product base and a similar member base. In one case, if site A is listed in the #1 spot, the traffic goes down so I keep it on the first page somewhere other than #1. Now, if site B is NOT listed in the #1 spot, traffic goes down. I'm not sure why, but that has been the case for the last 8 months. Any ideas?
Well, what I click on depends on the title and description - if it seems relevant or attractive enough I click on it. But still mostly on the first page...
"So I think having a second or third rank is better than having top rank. What do you think?" I think the top ranking site gets the most traffic.
I can think of a few exceptions to this rule, sometimes a new site will grab that number 1 slot but it still wont get as much traffic as a really well established site in the same niche thats considered an authority. For the most part though number #1 gets the heaviest traffic.
Click data for the top 10, this is compiled from some leaked search engine data and is an average for thousands of various search terms. Obviously a well structured Title & Description will increase your chances of a click-through on an individual basis.
It depends on what I'm looking for. If I'm not familiar with the webspace for a particular term, I click on the first result. If I recognize the top ranking sites, I may scan and click on my favorite site, which isn't necessarily ranked #1.
I think it depends on a) who's searching and b) what they're searching for. If I typed in "Digital Point Forums" in Google, and it was the fifth or sixth place, I'd click on that rather than what was first as I was looking specifically. Actually, I may click on what was first out of curiosity, as i'd expect Digital Point Forums to be first. However, if I typed in, for example, "Baby Furniture", i'd probably choose the first option as I don't know exactly what i'm searching for, so the first option is probably a good place to start. Overall though, I always shoot for the top spot. I'd rather risk a few people ignoring my website in first place, than I would hope that more people came to it if it was in a lower position. EDIT: Got there before me, ExtraArm! EDIT2: I've just realised I took nearly 15 minutes to post this. Jeez.
wow good information presented there, i realised that there was a difference but never realised it was that large.
Yeah there is a big difference, in general we don't notice it for two reasons. Not all datacenters may have you in #1, you might see your site jump to #1 but you could be #5 in dozens of other DC's so the traffic increase isn't that huge overall. Also being webmasters when we perform a query we have a good ability to scan the SERP's and differentiate the good from the junk, so we are more prone to clicking sites not in #1 but non tech savvy users generally click #1 because they assume it's most important and therefor the best.
Yeah i have read that different google datacenters rank websites in different places generally only a couple of ranks in between each datacenter but still. I generally use google webmaster tools to track my keywords however it does not seem very accurate at all. It may say i am rank 20 when in actual fact i am ranked 12th. Take this for example, all month i have been ranked about 12-15th for a certain keyword so i checked in google and i was actually 8th. So i change the text to add more keywords and then it changed from 12-15th to 6th-8th and now i am 15th in google when i search. This has happened between a couple of my keywords both ways round. Is this just google having a little "dance and a jiggle about"?
When you do a query, due to Google's load balancing server system your query gets routed to the closest DC with the lowest server load even though you always use Google.com for example. These DC's often have slightly different results, hence the different positions in the same query minutes apart. For instance i done a query an hour ago for "SEO" and i was #4, done it again just then and i'm #12. It's perfectly normal. If you want to use the same DC every time for the sake of consistency, go to command prompt and ping Google.com and grab the IP then bookmark it and do your check on that instead of using the Google domain name.
Both sites are ranked on the first page for the same keyword? (I am subscribing to this thread to read your answer).