The Boxxet Blog

Search Rankings: Top Five / Top Ten / Top Twenty

March 21st, 2007 You Mon Tsang

This is an installment of the ongoing “Metrics Series.”

When is being FIFTH 5x better than being TENTH? When you get in the Top Five of search results, of course! We’ve watched the power of being a Top Five search result for a very popular search and, in real time, watched what happens when we fall out of the Top Five.

Let me explain. Boxxet is still a very young site (been out for two months) and so we are still working our way up as an highly ranked site in Google and other search engines.

Several times, we notice that a certain news event would drive a lot of traffic to our site through a high ranking on a Google search. We would be ranked in the Top 3 or so. Partially, this is due to our crawlers doing a great job getting stories quickly. And partly this is luck (Google crawled that part of our site at the right time). We can easily measure the hourly rate of inbound traffic for such a search.

But as other more highly-ranked sites get the same story and get indexed, the Boxxet result falls down the rank. First to 6-10. Then off the first page to the mid-teens. And we can measure the traffic change.

Here is our estimate of what it means to be in the Top 5 / 10 / 20 of search results.

• Top Five is 5-6x better than Top Ten (6-10)
• Top Ten is 10x better than Top Twenty

I have seen references to more formal studies out there, but there is nothing like direct experience.

Entry Filed under: Boxxet, Metrics Series