I happened across an SEO conundrum related to what is actually the best ranked search result. Today I was looking up the acronym iirc - because I always forget what it means, even though I’ve seen it a thousand times and probably looked it up a half dozen times already. It’s just not a phrase I use often so I can’t retain it - too many things going on in my noggin I guess. So anyway, I searched Yahoo today and here’s what I saw:

Click to enlarge.

As you can see the top three results don’t actually tell me what I need to know while staying on the SERP, while the third clearly tells me exactly the information I’m looking for. Now here’s the conundrum. If Yahoo, or any of the search engines for that matter, rely on users to click on a link to register a vote for a particular search result, you’d see that the first three rank extremely high - because the user knows the information is there behind the links, even though it would save the user time and clearly make them less frustrated if they were simply able to get the information they were looking for.

So I’d say that for the user’s benefit the fourth link is by far the best, because I really didn’t want to click through, I just wanted the information. But in the case of the first three links, I think they are far better for the websites in question. In fact, the fact that the fourth link gives away the information is extremely bad for everyone else in that list, because it reduces the overall likelihood of a click-through for the other websites as well. Interesting problem in a way.