Silvery - 8:27 pm on Apr 12, 2006 (gmt 0)

A number of top SEOs have opined that Google cannot yet use the toolbar or other usage info such as their Urchin webbugs for deciding rank of pages. The general assessment has been that this would still be too prone to abuse/manipulation (hacking the Google toolbar would open this method up to being artificially influenced, because people could deploy automated requests against the toolbar apis to try to make sites seem more popular than they really are).

Someone earlier mentioned that in a Meet the Engineers session a Google engineer had mentioned that they wouldn't use this as a direct method of deciding rankings, but might use it for indirect influence of some unspecified sort.

Here's my take, based on usage analysis of a Fortune 10 company website: Google is not using Toolbar stats to generate a rank of a page (yet), but they are likely using it as a component of their quality assessments to pull bad pages/sites out of rankings.

Consider: if Toolbar and Urchin usage data was used in combination with methods which were proposed in the "Combating Web Spam with TrustRank" paper which was published out of Stanford, Google would have a strong tool for suppressing spammish/low-quality pages from their SERPs in an automated fashion. We know that they, like other SEs, use a number of staff members to manually assess the quality of search results and to identify spammers and other black hats. But, the combination of methods mentioned in their "Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data" patent and the Stanford paper would pave the way to improved automated assessment methods.

Simplistic explanation of how this works: the TrustRank study suggested that human assessors could rate a sample set of internet pages on whether they were good results for a keyword search or not. An algorithm could then be applied to those pages which were ranked as bad, and link structure patterns could be used to take all the pages associated with the "bad" sample set and suppress the low-quality pages at those sites and their related network sites.

Toolbar or webbug usage data could then be used to flag sites with high abandonment rates or links which users never chose to click, and then suppress rankings of all sites with pages associated to the bad ones. This would be fairly trustworthy data, and not as prone to manipulation by black-hats. After all, it would be using negative info rather than positive -- pages not visited, and pages which are not stayed-on longer by users could be automatically dropped in rankings. It's not as prone to manipulation by black-hats because they couldn't generate a negative -- they'd have to stay OFF sites and leave sites in droves, and compared with all the other browser users who are visiting a site, they wouldn't be as able to artificially cause competitor sites to drop in rankings.

So, if my theory is correct, Toolbar/Analytics data is not being used to make your site rank higher, but it could be used to drop you down in the results or smack you out of the indices entirely (if you've got pages that users hate).