The Secret Life of SERPs

As any SEO website owner knows, SERP is the acronym for "Search Engine Results Page," that beautiful list of links that you want your web page to be at the top of all the time. There's no real point to this article, except for a fun one: let's put on our pith helmets and make some general observations of SERPs as if they were gorillas in the mist!

Search engines like a scraper just as much as a low-ranking site.

A "scraper" is a site that literally steals your content from your page and reposts it, with a link back to justify the plagiarism. The annoying thing is when you search for your site plus a keyword, and five scraper sites appear before yours. Every now and then when Google is re-building their index, you'll see this.

High bounce rates aren't always bad.

Here's the thing that's bad: when the user bounces and immediately clicks another link in the SERP! This tells the search engine (rating these times with their redirected hashed links) that the user did not find what they were looking for on your site. However, when the user goes from SERP to your site to one of your ads - well, that's a good thing, then, isn't it?

SERPs are important in reputation management as well.

Many webmasters try to finagle several sites into the top results for the same terms, reasoning that if they have to compete with somebody, they can at least compete with themselves. This makes bad sense from an SEO standpoint, but good sense when you want to ensure that all of the top links about you are written by you or your "friends." It keeps bad press low on the page, you know. Another kind of asstroturf.

Studies and analyses show that ranking 1-10 on a search will get about 88% of all clicks.

The remaining 12% goes to results 11 to infinity...

The Google 'promote-remove-comment' buttons so far are still a cypher.

You only see them if you log in with your Google account. So far they seem to have little effect of changing results. It is doubtful that Google would allow the public to manipulate its results this way. So it's a feedback feature of some sort, while keeping the superfluous purpose of allowing the user to customize how the links show up on their own SERP. Which is different for everyone. So what's the point? Do users make the same search day in and day out, and if so why would they want to change the natural order?

"Cited by" in a SERP means that a link goes to that result from one or more pages with a ".edu" domain.

If you want search engine ranking gold, get a link from a .edu website! Enough of those puts your site in the pink forever; you could just about spam "mesotheleoma" to the page after that and it'll still rank high. Also, trusted authors are tracked by this system and ranked higher, even on hits that have nothing to do with the citation.

One easy way to rank higher for a high-competition keyword is to misspell it! For instance, the word for the lung disease you get from sucking too much asbestos (requiring a lawyer and a pot of paperwork to win compensation from the company that exposed you to it) which appears above is actually spelled with an 'i': "mesothelioma."