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How much is the top spot on Google actually worth?  According to data from the Chitika network, it’s worth a ton – double the traffic of the #2 spot, to be precise. In order to find out the value of SEO, we looked at a sample of traffic coming into our advertising network from Google and broke it down by Google results placement.  The top spot drove 34.35% of all traffic in the sample, almost as much as the numbers 2 through 5 slots combined, and more than the numbers 5 through 20 (the end of page 2) put together. “Obviously, everyone knows that the #1 spot on Google is where you want to be,” says Chitika research director Daniel Ruby.  “It’s just kind of shocking to look at the numbers and see just how important it is, and how much of a jump there is from 2 to 1.” The biggest jump, percentage-wise, is from the top of page 2 to the bottom of page 1.  Going from the 11th spot to 10th sees a 143% jump in traffic.  However, the base number is very low – that 143% jump is from 1.11% of all Google traffic to 2.71%.  As you go up the top page, the raw jumps get bigger and bigger, culminating in that desired top position. Google Result Impressions Percentage 1 2,834,806 34.35% 2 1,399,502 16.96% 3 942,706 11.42% 4 638,106 7.73% 5 510,721 6.19% 6 416,887 5.05% 7 331,500 4.02% 8 286,118 3.47% 9 235,197 2.85% 10 223,320 2.71% 11 91,978 1.11% 12 69,778 0.85% 13 57,952 0.70% 14 46,822 0.57% 15 39,635 0.48% 16 32,168 0.39% 17 26,933 0.33% 18 23,131 0.28% 19 22,027 0.27% 20 23,953 0.29% Numbers are based on a sample of 8,253,240 impressions across the Chitika advertising network in May, 2010.

Aggregating data by site vs by page If you group, filter, or compare by page or search appearance, all metrics in the report are aggregated by page; otherwise, all metrics are aggregated by site. For impressions, if a site appears twice on a search results page when aggregating by site, it counts as a single impression; if grouping by page or search appearance, each unique page is counted separately. For clicks, if a site appears twice in search results when grouped by site, and the user clicks on one link, backs up, then clicks the other link, it counts as a single click, since the final destination is the same site. For position, when aggregating by site, the topmost position of your property in search results is reported; when grouped by page or search appearance, the topmost position of the page in search results is reported. When aggregating data by site, the site is the true target of the search results link, which might not be the same as the displayed URL, as determined by Google's skip redirect behavior.  Because of the different accounting methods, the click-through rate and average position are higher when aggregating by site if multiple pages from the same site appear in the search results. For example, imagine that search results for "fun pets for children" returns only the following three results, all from the same site, and that users click each of them with equal frequency: Google Search Results Metrics Aggregated by Site Metrics Aggregated by Page www.petstore.example.com/monkeys www.petstore.example.com/ponies www.petstore.example.com/unicorns Click-through rate: 100% All clicks for a site are combined Click-through rate: 33% 3 pages shown, 1/3 of clicks to each page Average position: 1 Highest position from the site in the results Average position: 2 (1 + 2 + 3) / 3 = 2

Combining The URL Removal Tool With The Basic Tools Google’s URL Removal Tool only removes the content from their index for 90 days, so it is not permanent. It is important, therefore, that you take additional steps to make sure that content does not come back into the index. You need to combine its use with one of the Basic Tools discussed above. Here is a table that represents how I look at the choices: Tactic When to Use URL Removal Tool, Plus Deleting Pages and All Links to them, Plus 301s to Best Fit Pages Always the best choice if there is no need for the pages to exist and if you are able to eliminate the pages. URL Removal Tool Plus Rel=Canonical Tagging The best remaining choice if preserving PageRank is a priority; however, you can only use this when your pages are a true duplicate or a strict subset of the pages that the tags point to. URL Removal Tool Plus NoIndex Tag Use when preserving PageRank is a priority, but the Rel=Canonical tag is not appropriate. URL Removal Tool Plus DisAllow in Robots.txt Use when reducing the number of pages that the search engines have to crawl is the priority.