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PageRank trend across first ten pages of search results, for the search term "psychiatric services"

In yesterday's blog entry, I illustrated the effect of PageRank using a single search example. The first ten pages of search results were examined to see if there was a noticeable trend in PageRanks as we looked at each set of web pages, and their respective PageRanks, all the way from search results page 1 to search results page 10. That's about 100 web pages in all. The trend looked pretty obvious to me; Higher PageRanks tended to appear earlier in search results.

I received a number of challenges in email overnight, so I took two more examples to see if the pattern still held.

The second example was with the search term "psychiatric services" (for my friends at Valant Medical Services) and it came up with a very similar pattern to yesterday's experiment with the search words "investment services".

PageRank trend across first 10 pages of search results, for the search term "online pawnbroker". (click to expand)

Although the average PageRanks for the 2nd experiment were lower across the board that experiment #1, the trend was the same. Pages with higher PageRanks tended towards the top of search results.

Note: to get the average PageRank for all ten pages on a single search results page, I added .5 to each result, except where there was "no PageRank". I added the .5 because Google shows only integer value of the PageRank. For example, PageRank of 4 can be anything from 4.00 to 4.99. Thus, "4.5" is more likely to be nearer the actual PageRank value of 4, than 4.00 is. For PageRanks that are "not available" I took a PageRank of zero.

I then did the same experiment on a poorly served (in terms of technology) industry: Pawnbrokers. Although PageRank values were very low, the same basic pattern is discernible.

Here are my conclusions:

1. A higher PageRank increases your chances of appearing closer to the top of search results.
2. Page One of search results almost always has a higher average PageRank than any other search results page.
3. It appears that keyword matching is done first, then within each level of keyword matching, PageRank is the next sort order.
4. If a page has perfect keyword matching, it will appear ahead of less well matched pages with higher PageRanks.
5. Setting up your page for perfect keyword matching is the First Priority of the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) executive.
6. Maintaining a competitive PageRank is the Second Priority of the SEO executive.
7. The more competitive the industry (i.e. the more money in it) the sharper the trend line in PageRanks across the first 10 pages of search results.

Comments welcome...

Liam

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