Someone from our membership site recently asked "Do Popups Affect Ranking?" My gut instinct was "How could they?" and "Why would a search engine care whether your site used popups or not?" Then, I thought "Well; if the search engines do pay any attention to popups, they probably rank them lower due to quality issues." However, since it was a member of our site asking the question, I decided to run it through our statistical analysis engine. Wow! What a surprising result! Here is the methodology I used to answer this question. I gathered the results of the queries naturally performed last month by myself and three associates using Yahoo and Google. I then visited each page and kept a tally of pages that used the javascript "window.open" command (a very common way to implement popups). The tally was kept for each of the first eight rankings for each of the two largest search engines (Yahoo and Google).

On the Y-axis, you will see the number of pages found that use a javascript "window.open" command. On the X-axis, we have rankings from 1 to 8. Here are the graphs for Yahoo and Google:

Yahoo doesn't seem to care very much about use of the "window.open" command. However, the trend is positive. Pages with the "window.open" command did rank higher on average than pages without it.

The Google result was absolutely amazing though! The correlation was an amazing +92 on a scale of -100 to +100. Pages which used the "window.open" command ranked much higher in an extremely consistent manner than pages that did not use the "window.open" command.

Is it possible (likely?) that Google actually does use this as a ranking factor? Why? We may never know, but now we do know that pages that implement popups using the "window.open" command do rank higher on average on Yahoo and MUCH higher consistently on Google.

Notes:

1. Over 1,000 queries and over 10,000 sites were examined for this study.

2. There was no exercise to attempt to isolate different keywords. I merely took a random sampling of the queries performed by myself and three associates during the prior month.

Conclusion:

Pages using the javascript "window.open" command rank higher on both of the leading search engines (Yahoo and Google).

This is merely a correlation study, so it cannot be determined from this study whether the leading search engines purposefully entertain this factor or not. The actual factors used may be far distant from the factor we studied, but the end result is that both of these search engines do, in fact, rank pages with a "window.open" command higher on average.