Stuff Your Boss

I heard the other day a colleague ascerting that if all things were equal between a group of websites that the earliest site created on the Net would be the highest chosen in a set of search results. Something which is pretty hard to test, because ultimately its very unlikely that a group of sites could ever have everything equal. However the thought continued to ferment in my mind so I picked on a search phrase Marbella Apartments Spain I’ve used on a few occasions when selecting a good holiday in a location with lots of buzz!

The first thing which hits you on the most popular of search engines is that the total results given was in excess of one and a half million so surely, the top 10 carry a lot of weight, all have terms like “holiday rentals” “Villas to rent” “Marbella accommodation” and must each have major reasons for being listed. I’d read this week that theres the Go Green types who are encouraging websites to offset their carbon dioxide emissions by paying certain websites for green credentials on their sites as many folk get bogged down with the idea of how much energy they are using each time they do a search! Imagine the thought of flying to enjoy a beautiful holiday apartment in Marbella? How much carbon ?.

Thankfully none of the search providers take energy usuage into account when presenting the top 10 sites for me, or calculating on a GEO bases how much flting CO2 I would be using to reach my holiday location and rate accordingling!! Imagine such horror.

However,back to the search in hand – Holiday Apartments Marbella. which is in Spain for those who’ve never heard of it. The titles shown in the results were all very similar and the descriptions had a fair amount of differing content but I was set on finding out the domain creation date of each of them. There’s many whois lookup sites on the net, all of them show such information so i began recording each of the creation dates in order from one to number ten For the conclusion of earliest first having some bearing I was at least curious to see if the top results showed an older registration date than the ones at the bottom of the first page.

For this illustration I am Ignoring the months in each case… the run of years from number one to number ten goes like this: 2001; 1999; 2004; 2007; 2002; 1996; 2004; 2003; 1999; 2002. From the range of years and how they are as new as 2007 in position four yet 1999 in position 9, its clear that although they all have been around for a few years yet they dont have any direct order to age being the regulator to position. Have you heard of the phrase content is king? its something a lot quarters like to spout as the over riding decision factor and clearly a website with good content properly aimed at its target audience has to be a major benefit to both the site owner as well as the searcher. when going back to view the content of each of the top ten I see places where that rule doesnt seem to add up.

So it seems that the original hypothesis about older sites do better in search engines is only a part truth…. to satisfy my curiosity I looked at a page set back amongst the 12 page of results and there were plenty of old sites back there too. Clearly its unlikely to get a brand new site to the front of any large search result data set. However there’s clearly many other things at play here in final ordering, including but not limited to, site recommendations between sites, order of words used in the website’s titles etc and maybe even some sort of calculation on how popular the site is through visitors on its pages. I wonder if I’d had a different conclusion if I’d picked Apartments Algarve instead of picking Marbella? maybe next week as my heads spinning now.

http://greatwebexpectations.com