In a new study on factors that affect search engine rankings of Web pages, marketing analytics company Covario reported that the number of inbound links from other Web sites is the single most important factor in a page showing up prominently in search results.
Covario’s study—“A Statistical Analysis of Features Affecting Rank in Search Engine Results”—cited external inbound links from educational (.edu) sites, the Delicious social bookmarking site, government (.gov) sites, the blog indexer Technorati.com and Wikipedia, in that order, as returning particularly high page rankings.
In considering differences among the search engines, Covario reported that Google and Yahoo put more weight on external inbound links than did Microsoft’s Live Search. Yahoo and Microsoft, meanwhile, appeared to severely penalize pages with long URL names, while Google did not; although Google gave more weight to having large pages.
Covario’s study analyzed rank results using critical terms identified by its advertiser clients. More than 25,000 different URLs were analyzed.
Social networking and blogging have become more popular than sending email, according to a new report from Nielsen. More than two-thirds (67%) of the global online population now goes online to visit social networks and blogs. “Social networking has become a fundamental part of the global online experience,” says John Burbank, CEO of Nielsen Online.
“While two-thirds of the global online population already accesses member community sites, their vigorous adoption and the migration of time show no signs of slowing. Social networking will continue to alter not just the global online landscape, but the consumer experience at large. This study explains why.” The increasing reach of “Member Community” Web sites across 2008.Facebook is the most popular social network and is visited monthly by three in every 10 people online in the nine markets that Nielsen tracks social networking use. Orkut in Brazil has the largest domestic online reach (70%) of any social network in these markets. One in every 11 minutes online worldwide is accounted for by social networking and blogging sites.
The social network and blogging audience is becoming more diverse in terms of age. The biggest increase in visitors during 2008 to “Member Community” Web sites globally came from the 35-49 year old age group (+11.3 million).
Mobile is playing an increasingly important role in social networking. UK mobile users have the greatest tendency to visit a social network through their handset, with 23 percent doing so, compared to 19 percent in the U.S. These numbers are a significant increase over last year- up 249 percent in the UK and 156 percent in the U.S.