AOL Leaks Info on Google

By Lucas Roze & Julie Paulin

Ever wonder how ranking affects click through patterns by way of Google search engine? Or what is the importance of organic placement and referencing? Well thanks to a leak by AOL.com (for the US only) regarding their search results and click throughs, we where able to gather and analyse never before seen data from the secret vault of Google.

The AOL network uses Google as their search engine tool. The statistics leaked highlights millions of searches done on AOL and the percentage of people that clicked on the links displayed, which, correlates to its appropriate ranking. As data miners, this is “Pure Internet Gold”, direct from the belly of the beast.   

Here are some of the relative findings regarding organic click results by Olivier Duffez:

• First position ranking: Avg. CTR 3.5 times better than 2nd place
• Second position ranking: Avg. CTR 14 times better than 10th place
• Tenth position ranking: Avg. CTR is slightly more than 9th place (??)

Displayed below is a graph from the info retrieved from www.webrankinginfo.com illustrating the click percentage for the page rank with the top ten indexed sites.

The statistics gathered by www.webrankinginfo.com was calculated on 4.9 million clicks for the first ranked position, and 7.7 million clicks for the second ranked position. So we can assume that this is a realistic look at the Google engine ranking click thought, but on a smaller scale.