I ran across something rather interesting the other day. Now, every search engine has a different way of producing its search results. Google among many other things, considers what it calls page rank in how it orders search results.
Google gives the pages it indexes a rank from 0 to 10, with 10 being the most coveted. There are only a handful of pages with a rank of 10. Apple.com is one of them. I am not that surprised. (Disclosure—I am a big Mac fan.) What did surprise me was that Microsoft.com was not one of them. Rather, Microsoft.com had a page rank of 9. What was even more bizarre was that when I checked the backlinks to both sites, here is what came up:
For www.apple.com:
- Yahoo! has found 1,968,600 links to this site.
- MSN Search has found 1,624,874 links to this site.
And, for www.microsoft.com
- Yahoo! has found 4,661,700 links to this site.
- MSN Search has found 3,299,908 links to this site.
So much for the rule of “he who has the most links wins.” Microsoft has more than double. Now, these things can rapidly change. A slight shift in Google’s algorithm and everything I am writing now could be history, so don’t email me or comment about my info being off.
So I have to wonder, is Google favoring Apple? Could it be that since Microsoft competes with Google for search engine market share, that could be impacting its page rank? Could it be that since Apple’s Safari was one of the first browsers to include Google as the default search engine, that its a some kind of kickback?
Enough on this, I have to get back to catching up with the big boys—I only need a few million more backlinks.