the insidedesign blog

A recent study held by Cornell University has revealed that students have strong faith in Google’s ability to ranks search engine results based on relevancy. Published in the Journal of Computer-Medicated Communication, the study points out that the student’s “decisions were strongly biased towards links higher in position even if the abstracts themselves were less relevant.” Well, not a very ground breaking statement.

We all understand that users are strongly biased towards higher positions in the SERPs, it shows in our logs! However, and more interesting, the study goes on to conclude:

“While the participants reacted to artificially reduced retrieval quality by greater scrutiny, they failed to achieve the same success rate. This demonstrated trust in Google has implications for the search engine’s tremendous potential influence on culture, society, and user traffic on the Web.”

So, users are heavily biased towards the top listings on Google – even if the provided title and description is not relevant! They trust in Google, and truly believe what is being provided to them is the best results. But what does this mean to a search engine optimization professional? Here are some points that come to mind:

1. General, high traffic keywords bring lots of visitors – a high percentage being low quality and unqualified visitors.
2. Optimize for niche keywords to keep conversion rates high.
3. A high listing in the SERPs is an authority and trust builder with users.

Check out the study, an interesting read for any technical SEO professional.

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