With the addition of real time results, and less recent music results on Google’s front page, talk has started at the office about what exactly Google is counting as a result (when it says “Results 1 – 10 of about 16,200,000”) and more importantly, what the average user is counting as a legitimate result.
Before we get into what’s really happening here, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page first with a few definitions.
Organic search results: listings that appear on SERPs not because they are paid advertisements, but because of their relevance to the search term.
OneBox results: Google defines their “OneBox” results on their blog: “on top of the organic results (and sometimes at the bottom), Google shows OneBox results for queries that can be answered instantly or when a direct link can be offered.” You would recognize these, as they are mostly accompanied by an image. Users will commonly see OneBox results for news, images, music, and video results.
From what I’ve seen today after searching numerous terms, its obvious (and really always has been) that Google has a formula for how many results, organic and OneBox alike, they’ll show on a page. Now I know what you’re thinking, especially if you don’t work in search engine optimization: “but they always have ten results on the first page!” Not necessarily true.
Say you search for something no one cares about; for example, my boss Aaron.
I search for “my boss aaron” and get back 10 organic results. No OneBox results apply here.
However, say you search for something everyone cares about at the moment – you’re going to see strikingly different results there. I searched for “golden globes” and this is what I found:
Not counting the OneBox results or double listings, we have nine organic showing up here. Assuming that Google wants to keep the page length down, it seems that the more OneBox results, the less organic, which admittedly makes sense. If one shopping box shows up, ten organic results remain. Two to four OneBoxes and you’ll see nine results. At five OneBoxes, however, it looks like Google takes the organic number down to eight, as seen in this search for “John Lennon”.
So the real question here is how many results do the average users think they’re seeing? Do they believe the OneBox results are the same as any organic result?
According to a survey I conducted on surveymonkey.com earlier today – they do. When showed a picture of the “golden globe” results, a majority of the subjects counted 13 results on the page, with a close runner-up of 14 including even the double listing and trends at the bottom as a separate result. With the “John Lennon” search, an almost unanimous amount counted 14. In the end, 86% of the survey participants admitted to know nothing about Google rankings, they just took the survey because I asked on Twitter, which is great because that’s the demographic that really matters here.
While all of us nerds in SEO are obsessing about rankings, and what number our client ranks on the first page, your everyday searcher really might not be noticing. We have no control or influence on where and when these OneBox results show up, which can be tricky since these OneBoxers are replacing a potential organic ranking result. Users are just as likely to click on one of the results Google provides than any of the hard-earned organic listings below. So how can we tell our clients that OneBox results don’t technically “count” as organic results? How can we possibly tell them to ignore the fact that they are pushing them down the page when in reality, users are obviously literally counting them?
