John Mueller of Google said on a Google webmaster hangout at the 38:30 mark into yesterday's hangout that Google uses the same algorithm to rank the first page results that it does for the other pages in their search results. He said the top ten results are ranked using the exact same algorithm as results 11 through 100.
John said "it's the same algorithm," when asked about if the algorithm is different between the top ten and the other results.
Here is the video embed where he talks about this:
Question Transcript:
Is the algorithm the same for the top 10 and for 11 to 100? I see websites jump directly from a hundred to 20 but those that are in the top 10 take too much time to jump to fifth or fourth. So I wanted to know if the algorithm that runs is on the same level or not?
Answer Transcript:
Yes. It's the same algorithm essentially that does all of this ranking. And usually what happens is that there's a lot of competition for the head of some of these queries and that makes it a little bit harder to jump around in the top of their search results. Whereas on the lower part of the search results things can shuffle around quite a bit and that's kind of natural because there's just a lot less competition in those places.
Interesting question, don't you think?
Forum discussion at Google+.
