Buyer's Guide … the one with the Encyclopedia!

Search Engine Ranking

The RP Photonics website is immensely popular not only among hundreds of thousands of human users, but also has been recognized by all the major search engines as one of the very best sites for the area of photonics, and for laser technology in particular. It contributes substantially to our huge traffic.

Try it out!

In contrast to traffic data, you can easily verify yourself the search engine ranking of this website or any other one:

(Caution: avoid personalized searches; if your favorite search engine recognizes you due to a cookie, it may deliver your own company results preferentially, simulating a much higher ranking. Use Startpage, for example, to avoid that.)

If you do such searches, also look out for pages from the major publishers, well-known institutions and big companies – in many cases, you will find them far below our pages in the search results, if at all.

How Can That Be?

You may be very surprised that RP Photonics outperforms all other players (even far bigger ones) on a wide range of keywords in the area of photonics, but you can easily check yourself (see above) that this is a fact, and it has been so for years.

The reason behind this is that the RP Photonics website contains an enormous wealth of high quality technical and scientific information. It is not just a huge number of pages (several thousands), but a coherent body of information from which professionals can profit every day. Search engines like Google can estimate the value of this website in various ways:

(show detailed explanations)
  • They find a huge number of pages which are all about photonics and are connected with intense internal linking.
  • The analysis of the pages with certain algorithms confirms that we work with honest methods, based on presenting a huge amount of valuable information to the community, rather than trying to acquire traffic with doubtful tricks.
  • There are many thousand links on the Internet to pages of this resource, underlining the high international reputation and popularity of the RP Photonics website.
  • Most search engines can also monitor how many people actually click on search results leading to the RP Photonics website. In that way, they recognize that many users prefer our pages on some topic over those of other websites.

Note that even a large publisher, having thousands of online articles on photonics, can hardly compete, since these do not form a coherent body of information, thus hardly give an incentive for users to browse such websites, and also are often far too much motivated by some supplier to sell certain products. (You wouldn't link to such pages, would you?)

Search engines do not care how large the company or institution behind the website is. What counts is only content, quality and popularity.

What to Conclude?

Obviously, it would be a big mistake to spend all your advertising budget on websites which exhibit a much lower performance than ours. You achieve more for your company on our site:

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There are actually more reasons for that decision, such as fair prices and a helpful service, but the central aspect is obviously where your target audience is. Those people with the laser goggles are found on our pages more than anywhere else!