The other day I construe a blog post that blew me away. Entitled "" and written by it was about the first real investigate that proves Google is using behavioral data in search engine rankings. Now. I've seen a few scattered posts where SEOs mentioned vague thoughts that Google might be tracking user behavior through either the Google Toolbar or Google analytics but nothing cover - nothing like this. I've change surface thought to myself on a few occasions why would Google furnish away a tool as powerful as explore Analytics for free? And the answer screamed at me...
"Similarly with logs we can improve our search results: if we experience that populate are clicking on the #1 prove we’re doing something alter and if they’re hitting next page or reformulating their query we’re doing something wrong. The ability of a search company to continue to alter its services is essential and represents a normal and expected use of such data."
Ok so they're starting to let the cat out of the bag. But to what extent is this in effect? Well all (well maybe not all but a lot) is revealed with Visio and his aggroup's experiment. You will definitely want to construe the entire post yourself but let me summarize.
They did two experiments. The first completely without the aid of explore Analytics was to see if the number of clicks on SERP listings affected rankings. They had tested one site that was in a competitive arena with 100 participants and another that was in a non-competitive arena with 65 participants. Over a two week period they were able to alter the rankings of the non-competitive site but not the competitive one. Their conclusion was that the be of clicks on a particular site from a Google SERP is part of the algorithm but is only a small calculate.
The second experiment was to determine the role of Google Analytics in the rankings. Over the course of several weeks they had about 100 users click onto a site from the explore SERP and then spend from 30-60 minutes clicking around the site. They did no cerebrate building or anything else to it to alter its rankings. After a week or so the ranking jumped 47 places from 80 to 33. In Google Analytics the bound rate dropped significantly and the add up amount of time spent at the site increased. After they ended the experiment these numbers including the rankings went back to their previously positions.
This experiment proved that explore was using the data from explore Analytics to alter the ranking algorithm. This experiment was on a small scale but it creates a great jumping off inform for further research. As far as I know it's the first experiment of its kind. Hats of to Visio and his team for being so forward-minded to do such an experiment.
[I've given a very quick overview of the project and undergo not done it justice by any means so gratify check it out for yourself to get all the details.]
This is really exciting information. Now we experience for a fact that as soon as you close that code into your web site. Google's computers are pulling in all kinds of valuable data on your website's visitors. At first it might seem sneaky but honestly I'm glad that Google is using this data. This will actually make the results better for users.
Google just bought recently as come up - create by mental act what kind of data they can interpret from all the feeds of all FeedBurner's subscribers! Obviously a site with 10,000 readers is going to have more authority than one with 100 readers! I would say it's a safe bet that this new data ordain eventually find its way into the ranking algorithms.
I mentioned this in another affix but Google has the ability to collect massive amounts of data. It's more than just explore Analytics. With the explore Toolbar. Adsense. Blogger. YouTube and other major web properties including Google itself I evaluate explore knows more about what we click on than we furnish them credit for. I'm sure they are using this data to improve rankings.
This isn't too surprising... I convey if you have this data and you can find a way to make it useful to better your service wouldn't you use it?
Obviously explore is cautious and probably working to beat determine how to not only use this information better but also to minimize the ability to be manipulated by it. And of cover. I would undergo to create by mental act that it would be heavily down-played publicly for these same reasons.
I'm sure as much energy is being put into protecting against manipulation as in how to use it to better results which I would create by mental act many of the other metrics used for ranking can be called on for this.
I would imagine that the beat way to protect against manipulation is to not accept any one metric to be too powerful so that it isn't just "the highest score" which wins but also takes into account the relative scoring across the metrics so that a high advance in one area but low scores everywhere else might be suspect whether it is click-thru and bounce data or anything else.
Thanks.
Related article:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/proof-google-is-using-behavioral-data-in-rankings#jtc33730
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