A somewhat overlooked post on Jim Boydkin’s blog: Click Rate for Top 10 Search Results:

Datamining of the AOL data apparently shows some clear figures for clickthrough rates on Top 10 positions:

Results in:
Total Searches:9,038,794
Total Clicks: 4,926,623

Click Rank1: 2,075,765
Click Rank2: 586,100 = 3.5x less
Click Rank3: 418,643 = 4.9x less
Click Rank4: 298,532 = 6.9x less
Click Rank5: 242,169 = 8.5x less
Click Rank6: 199,541 = 10.4x less
Click Rank7: 168,080 = 12.3x less
Click Rank8: 148,489 = 14.0x less
Click Rank9: 140,356 = 14.8x less
Click Rank10: 147,551 = 14.1x less

Click Rank1: 2,075,765
Click Rank2: 586,100 = 3.5x less than ^
Click Rank3: 418,643 = 1.4x less than ^
Click Rank4: 298,532 = 1.4x less than ^
Click Rank5: 242,169 = 1.2x less than ^
Click Rank6: 199,541 = 1.2x less than ^
Click Rank7: 168,080 = 1.2x less than ^
Click Rank8: 148,489 = 1.1x less than ^
Click Rank9: 140,356 = 1.05x less than ^
Click Rank10: 147,551 = 1.05x more than ^

Usually Google does a pretty good job at indexing. Traditionally Google was more interested in capturing as much information from the web as possible.

More recently, it seems as though Google’s policy may have changed - though any existing indexing concerns may be due to Google’s bad data push.

I’ve seen this issue really acutely on a relatively new forum I set up on a relatively established website. So far, Google hasn’t been in at all.

Bad data push, or something restrictive on the website?

Either way, I’m going to do a little experiment here - by listing a couple of the main forum boards, will that help with indexing?

Traditionally it would - but if not, it may well suggest that something new really is at play in terms of Google indexing, which would be a very interesting change indeed.

Here are the boards:

General Investing
Fund Management
Equities

Now let’s test the indexing…