3 ms·
It's well known that traffic and SERP CTR has a significant impact on rankings. About a year ago, I wrote a post on my blog about how to write a bot in Ruby usi
by ddemchuk 16y ago
It's well known that traffic and SERP CTR has a significant impact on rankings. About a year ago, I wrote a post on my blog about how to write a bot in Ruby using Watir, and I submitted it here. Within 24 hours, I had gotten over 1000 uniques and had a front page ranking for the term "ruby bot" and "ruby web bot". I run Google Analytics on my blog, and Google has provisions in its algorithm to account for "breaking news" and because my site rapidly received traffic and links, they chucked it up onto the front page for these terms.
I've maintained the rankings because of the links I received during that traffic spike as well as the traffic coming in through the search engine results. What better way for Google to test whether a site is actually decent or not than to rank it quickly because it's getting traffic, then keep it there or drop it based on the CTR and Bounce Rate of the site? It's possible to game these metrics, but not as easily as something like link or content spam.
For reference, the blog post is: http://www.layeredthoughts.com/automation/how-to-write-your-first-ruby-web-bot-in-watir-scraping-weather-com http://www.layeredthoughts.com/automation/how-to-write-your-...
- _delirium 16y agoI can believe that CTR has a significant impact, but how could traffic have an impact? Matt Cutts says explicitly that search doesn't touch any data from Analytics in any way: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgBw9tbAQhU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgBw9tbAQhU
- epoxyhockey 16y agoIt's not from Analytics.. Log out of your gmail account, clear your cache, do a google search for "it turns out" and then right-click -> copy the URL of the first hit. Then, paste that into notepad.
- _delirium 16y agoIsn't that just how they count CTR / from-Google traffic? I thought the previous poster was suggesting that traffic from HN to his blog was upping his Google ranking (in addition to CTR), because Google detected a traffic spike indicating some variety of trending/breaking news. But if Google doesn't use Analytics data for ranking, how could they know that his blog was getting a spike of traffic from sources other than Google search?
- bigiain 16y agoNote the post you're discussing explicitly says "SERP CTR": "It's well known that traffic and SERP CTR has a significant impact on rankings." We can see they're measuring it, it's obviously at least worth investigating as a signal, I'd be absolutely astounded if they aren't using it. (I'm also a little surprised at Matt's continued insistence that the search team don't use CTR data from the Adwords and/or Analytics teams data. As a user-of-search, I'd like them to use _all_ available signals, and I suspect the Google Analytics data contains information which would noticeably improve the quality of search results).
- ig1 16y agoIt would probably be illegal. Google is the dominant player in both the analytics and the search space, using it's dominance in one area to strengthen in dominance in another would practically be asking for an anti-trust suit. Plus it's incredibly easy to rig google analytics data, you can just modify the GA javascript you're serving.
- ddemchuk 16y agoThe golden rule if you want to become a good SEO is to not take Matt Cutts (or anyone at the big 3 for that matter) at face value when they say things. Test test test. Traffic (and Analytics data) absolutely has an effect on your rankings. As mentioned above, it's part of the QDF effect