Move Over, Wikipedia: Amazon May Be The King Of Google Rankings

While the SEO industry has spent years decrying how well Wikipedia seems to dominate Google’s rankings, it may be that Amazon.com is the real king of visibility.

For most of the past 18 months or so, Amazon has shown up on the first page of Google search results more often than Wikipedia and currently lands on page one about 40 percent of the time, compared to just over 30 percent for Wikipedia. That’s according to new research from SpyFu, which was published this week in response to our coverage of a Conductor study on Wikipedia’s Google visibility.

As you can see in the chart below, Amazon’s page one visibility on Google has been steadily increasing over the past five years, and sometime around the fall of 2010, Amazon shot past Wikipedia. Aside from two drops, Amazon has stayed higher.

SpyFu used its “SEO Recon database,” which the company says has 699 million Google search results pages (SERPs); for the purpose of this research, SpyFu looked at Google SERPs going back five years.

There’s a caveat, of course: SpyFu says its “keyword selections are more likely to be keywords that people advertise on; they are much more likely to transactional.” The blog post also says that these are likely to be high-volume, high-competition keywords.

SpyFu went beyond page one and looked at what sites have the most visibility in the top 50 results on Google. Wikipedia and Amazon are neck-and-neck there.

Despite the biases in its keyword set, SpyFu’s research mostly confirms the Conductor research on Wikipedia’s visibility level in Google’s search results. It also confirms a separate study from Slingshot SEO.

There’s a lot of other interesting data in the SpyFu research, including some research showing a huge spike in YouTube’s Top 50 Google visibility — a spike that appears to begin not long after Google launched its Panda update.