July 11, 2007 10:23 AM
Is It the End of Page View Site Ranking as We Know It?
Nielsen/NetRatings, the research firm that used to rank websites based on the number of page views generated announced that it will be abandoning its old metrics and will instead based site rank on how long a user stays on a particular site. Part of the decision to forego page views as a ranking metrics is due to the availability of web technologies particular the AJAX system which can automatically generates page loads with a user action to refresh. This generates more page views for a particular site which propels its ranking in the Nielsen metrics.
Although the decision seems to be valid, many are speculating that this would give a serious blog into the ranking of current website leaders more prominently AOL, Google, Video Uploading sites among other web portals. Google's would certainly be affected but I don't think the company are a bit worried about this. Google has emerged as a giant search engine company that it no longer relies on third party metrics to validate its usage. And besides, should the new Nielsen net ranking metrics prove to be detrimental to Google's corporate status, it can always count on its video uploading site, YouTube, which would certainly receive a high ranking during Nielsen's ranking activity.
Likewise, AOL and Yahoo are set to benefit from this new metric once a new survey is conducted and the results released anytime soon. AOL users linger on the site more than the usual lenght of time a Google user stays on its portal. Yahoo, has always been the leader in terms of page views generated visitor traffic. Thus, more often than not, Yahoo beats Google on most of the ranking study.
As for the other web pages, once this new metric measures their ranks, and those ranks are accepted by search engine ranking system, this would certainly hurt their popularity and profitability in terms of paid ads, text link ads, affiliate marketing and others.
But then, again who cares if the new metrics starts to affect web rankings. The more important thing is, web sites sustain their readership base and forget about some third-party ranking studies.
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