Who Wins 'Click Here'
The w3c, the nominal leader of web standards, has a recommendation against using click here or here as the text for links on web pages. In addition to the good reasons they provide, there's google to consider. Google assigns page rank to web sites based on, among a great many other things, the text used in links to that page. When you link to https://ry4an.org/ with ry4an as the link text I get more closely associated with the term ry4an in google's rankings. However, when you link to a page using generic link text, such as here or click here you're not really helping anyone to find anything any easier.
That said I wondered who was winning the battles for google's here and click here turf. To find out I took the top entries for each and then googled them with both click here and here. Here's the resulting table.
| Phrase | Here | "Click Here" | ||
| Measure | Rank | Hits | Rank | Hits |
| Adobe | 1 | 14,300,000 | 1 | 11,000,000 |
| QuickTime | 2 | 3,560,000 | 2 | 1,830,000 |
| "Real Player" | 3 | 1,720,000 | 4 | 900,000 |
| "Internet Explorer" | 4 | 13,500,000 | 3 | 7,940,000 |
| MapQuest | 5 | 1,970,000 | 5 | 1,130,000 |
| ShockWave | 7 | 1,240,000 | 6 | 564,000 |
So, what can we conclude from these numbers? Nothing at all. They provide only an aggregate of popularity, web design savvy, and a bunch of other unidentified factors. But, there they are just the same.
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