I ran across a hot topic on Sphinn titled “Google Showing Bias Towards .org TLDs” and thought to take a look at how other sites/people are trying to run tests on what matters to Google. I am always appreciative to see people trying to run tests that go beyond just pure guesses as I’ve stated before about statistical SEO. Below are some of the findings from The Google Cache on what TLDs matter:

Preliminary Results:

The results were quite shocking. The .org subdomains outranked all other extensions. As you can see, the .nets and .coms are intermixed, some not ranking at all, but the .orgs are stacked at the top. While these results must be taken with a grain of salt until they can be verified on a much larger scale, it does indicate that there may be some bias towards the .org top level domain. (many have suspected this) These results have shown true on appx 80% of datacenters we have tested.

[...]

Implications:

1. Further study is definitely needed. Virante will be expanding the number of test subjects greatly and testing with and without subdomains.
2. Considering the costs are quite similar, it may make sense to begin using .orgs, like our good friends at SEOMoz

I’ve gone through my share of econometric papers, so I usually quickly turn my eyes to what the set-ups were to test such an experiment. First, let’s look at the methodology:

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Craig Hordlow put forth an interesting concept publicly that he’s been working on for awhile noting that Google’s growth is slowing as more and more people go directly to other sites such as Craigslist or Youtube or Wikipedia to find information within their respective niche as those sites become the authority over time and as such, people begin to not use Google’s search engine as much. He explains it as such:

What I mean by that is that, for example, people are less likely to go to Google and search for “apartments in San Francisco”, or “cleaning services in San Francisco”. They’ll either go straight to Craigslist.org, yelp.com, cityspace.com, or another destination.

This is because as people become more familiar with the web’s flora, they don’t need search to guide them to obvious destinations. So they use search increasingly for eclectic reasons and less for simple navigation.

[...]In 2005, the top 5 sites were all search engines. Now there are only 4 search engines in the top 10, and we have 4 social networking sites (none in 2005).

As much as I dislike having to disagree with him, here are the basic reasons why his facts are off:

• Graph does not directly show a correlation
• He’s using Alexa for the data
• One graph cannot show that the reason for peaked growth is due to a change in search habits

More details after the jump.
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Search Engine Optimization, though around for about a decade or so now since its inception, is still a relatively new field of work. New enough that I would still qualify SEO as a soft science as there are no publicly detailed statistical studies using regression analysis and other econometrics work on what factors really help sites rank on the top of search engines (This is not to say that there are not any statistical analyses out there, just none using proper regression analyses outside of Excel).

Try searching the following phrases in Google:

• Econometrics and SEO
• SEO regression analysis
• SEO regressions

the lack of any papers on these topics? I’m not surprised as I doubt even 5% of the people I chat with randomly at parties know what SEO or a Search Strategist is—and I live in the heart of Silicon Valley with a large number of computer nerd friends. (more…)

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