Click Through Rates and Your Google Ranking
It seems that Google might be tracking click-throughs and rewarding those sites with higher click through rates, similar to what they do with their AdWords program...
Welcome to part six in our series of posts about the new Google patent specification and what it may mean for the rankings of your website.
Google Patent and Click Through Rate Tracking
The patent specification also indicates that Google might track the behavior of web surfers through bookmarks, cache, favorites, and temporary files (possibly with the Google toolbar and the Google desktop search tool).
Google's Patent filing indicates Google might track the following information:
- Click through rates are monitored for changes in seasonality, fast increases, or other spike traffic
- Click through rates are monitored for increase or decrease trends
- Volume of searches over time is recorded and monitored for increases
- Information regarding a web page's rankings are recorded and monitored for changes
- Click through rates are monitored to see if stale or fresh pages are preferred for a particular search query
- Traffic to a web page is recorded and monitored for changes
- User behavior on web pages is monitored and recorded for changes (use of the back button etc)
- User behavior may also be monitored through bookmarks, cache, favorites, and temporary files
- Bookmarks and favorites could be monitored for both additions and deletions
- Overall user behavior for trends and changes can be statistically analysed
- Time spent on a web page could be used to indicate it'd quality and freshness
Click Through, Page Titles and Bookmarks
Since Google is capable of tracking click-through rates from the serps to your website, it's a good idea to spend time making your page titles attractive and use calls to action so that web surfers actually click on them in the search results.
It's also important to keep your visitors there, so make your web pages interesting enough that web surfers stay to take it all in. It might also help if your website visitors added you to their bookmarks, so provide them with a user friendly means to do that.
Google's new ranking criterion has evolved far beyond that which can be readily or easily manipulated. Whatever direction search innovation and technology goes, you can bet that Google will be leading the way!
Return to the first in our series of articles on Google patent specifications and how they effect your website rankings, Google Patent Specification to Fight Artificial Link Acquisition and Search Engine Spam.
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