jfranktoo

In an earlier post on another topic Bagi said he thought that Google's algo could note the way people behaved in a site, staying on some sites longer than on others, and could possibly re-rank them slightly. Charlesgan also commented that he thought that Google could be planning to include some kind of total traffic measure in future.

Bagi asked what others thought of this - I hope I'm quoting him properly - and the topic interests me for designing our new site. I could design it to reduce the bounce rate and maybe make it a bit more sticky without using black hat techniques.

Actually, I wouldn't recognise a black hat if I was wearing one.

What do others think, and also what techniques might one use legitimately to get people to stay on a site/page a bit longer?

John

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Bagi Zoltán

John, i know that you are curious about other's point of view now, but i don't suggest you to use any script or tricky redirection in order to disable the returning opportunity to the ranking page.s

Concentrate on the quality content and on the relevance with backlinks and build a maximally user friendly site. You will see that you don't need to use any trick to achieve high rankings if you targeted keyphrases are relevant.

Bagi

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jfranktoo

Bagi, honestly I would not do that even if I knew how. No, there are things I can do with the content and navigation. For example I know very well the three things that my site visitors want to know and there are other things they must check out before they decide.

In our existing site, I used to give them all this information on page one. Not only did it ruin the look of the page, it also stopped them from bookmarking the site and it meant they left the site immediately without looking at it properly.

Once I'd moved them into the Main navigation page, their whole site experience was better and they stayed longer. Ours is a very content rich site, but they can't see that if they just hit the index page and go.

For example, I can open links in new windows, which stops them leaving the site for as long as they stay on the new window.

Originally when they left the site quickly they looked at 3pp on average - now they look at 6pp

Bagi, you are like my wife, whom I love dearly. She worries too much about rogues, vagabonds and wickedness in general. And yet she married me! Wonders will never.... but thank you for replying. You work so hard at this.

John

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jfranktoo

Imagine you are Google. You've got to sort out three sites, each of them with identical pr and backlinks, each of them Seo'd to fit the search term, each with rich content and each of the same age.

Site A index page, has a low bounce rate of, say, 40%, and people stay on the site for 6 minutes average.
Site B index page has a high bounce rate of 60% but people stay on the site for 6 minutes average
Site C index page has a high bounce rate of 60% and people stay on it for only 3minutes on average.

Assuming that you, as Google, rigorously investigate any black hat tricks which might get this result artificially and you find none, would you not then put site A at the top, site B next, and Site C at the lowest order?

Maybe the algo cannot tell how long people stay on the site, nor the bounce rate, except for their Analytics' sites. But I think there is a clue in Analytics.

If Google puts these factors in their Analytics Dashboard, saying in effect, these factors are important for webmasters, would they not rely on them too for ranking - well, to some extent.

I bet you could add in total traffic, (no of unique/return visits) as an extra factor. That's what I do if I were Lady Google, what do you experts think?

John
Ps Take it easy, I don't know nothing about nothing, just guessing.

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Flipflop

Google have explicitly said that they do not use data collected from Google Analytics to determine search engine results, or so I believe, I can't find the details on it so like most things it's speculation. I just remember there was big thing about that very theory quite a while ago now, where there was a rumour that they did and using Analytics could affect your ranking, I remember it because I stopped using Analytics at the time for that reason and have only started using it again recently.

Well doing some research it still looks like the Jury is out on this one, there is some great reading HERE
on the subject, take your time and read all the comments which put up some good points for both sides of the argument.

HTH

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OldWelshGuy

Google have been monitoring click through positions for about 2 years now. I honestly can not say whether or not they use them as part of their algorithm as I have not carried out any heavy duty testing with the required control sites.

It does of course make sense, but then HOW can they use it? The data they have is so minute it would only skew the serps.

1. toolbar with reporting only a couple of % of the web population have this.
2. Analytics, only a fraction of 1% use this
3. Mozilla firefox. THIS is where google might get userdata from as they are pally pally with the firefox team. offices at the plex, christmas parties together etc.

I would say NO! But that is best guess, not anything else.

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