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Average PageRanks for each of the first 10 pages of search results from the search term "investment services" (click to expand)

There is a lot of controversy surrounding the role PageRank plays in where a page displays in Google search results.

Using the search words "investment services", I noted the PageRank of every web page listed on each of the first 10 pages of search results. I then averaged out the numbers per search results page. I added up all PageRanks of the ten pages of the first page of search results and divided the result by ten (to get the average). I repeated the process for the other 9 pages of search results and charted the results.

Clearly, there is a pattern; the better a page's PageRank, the greater chance it has of appearing earlier in search results. There are lots of other factors of course but PageRank clearly plays a significant role.

Some interesting things about the results, for me at least:

1. How quickly the average PageRank goes from "5-point-something" to "3-point something". With the thousands upon thousands of investment services companies across the web, only a few dozen have secured a good enough PageRank to get into the first few pages of search results. PageRanks drop off significantly after only a half dozen pages of search results. The first ten pages were the first in about 32 million pages that matched the search words. (There are well over a billion pages on the Internet).
2. The second interesting thing for me is I would have thought Investment Services companies would have the resources (money) to get their web presence competitive, their PageRank up, their keywords optimized in order to appear early in search results. There seems to be little effort to do so.

That suggests to me, there is a huge opportunity for lesser companies to steal the show and get ahead of bigger players in search results.

Some pages would not respond, or they returned a value of "no pagerank available"; for those I entered an "x" in the spreadsheet and counted them as a PageRank of zero. When an actual PageRank value was returned, I added .5 to it, because Google simply displays the integer value; in actual fact, a PageRank of 5, for example, is "five point something", so 5.5 is more likely to be closer to the real PageRank value than 5.0 is.

More when I think of it....

Liam

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