Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Think about it... the Google Toolbar, Google Analytics and click monitoring on the SERPs give Google an incredible picture of where people are going, what pages they stay on, what sites they frequently return to and where they go when they leave.
We know that Google is pushing the toolbar onto consumers. They're paying Dell a billion dollars to install it onto 100 million consumer PC's. Imagine what the behavior patterns of 100 million Internet users could tell Google about a particular site's value.
What scares me is that this will push the blackhats from link spamming over to the busy spyware world. Imagine if I could pay some shady company to have the web browsers of 100,000 pc's randomly click on my #10 ranked link and stay on my site until Google decides that I should be #1. Who cares if these users buy anything on my site. I just want Google to THINK that they're using it. Will Google start bundling anti-spyware with the toolbar to stop this?
Am I on to something, or has this been going on for years?
[edited by: tedster at 8:38 pm (utc) on April 6, 2006]
I do believe that google does analyse and use visitor behaviour, but I also think the level of mathematical abstraction and analysis is far higher than suggested here. E.g. neuronal networks and statistical correlations we can't think of, simply because we have no insight into that data.
I would guess the target is less an undefined quantity that is hard to optimise [the world population over all web pages - good luck to anyone trying], but more a clearly defined target, like maximising income. That is a neat figure you can optimise.
Ranking sites based on visitor time spent/movement would penalize sites with easy/intelligent navigation and Google Adsense with high CTR.
crob305, there's a big difference between a user clicking through to content he finds on the page, and just hitting the back button to find better results on the SERP.
So, using pattern identification based on visitor time spent on a page and movement doesn't necessarily penalize the good sites, and it could likely be used to red-flag the bad ones for special treatment.
as well as move them up in SERP as long as the site has related content and has been around for a while, why not just 'lift' it up a 'notch' just cause there is no budjet in'vested from the site, and 2 below spend like monkies at G-Parade.
G-Parade is a registered XMark of 'Show me the Budjet Corporation'
P.S. 9 + 2 = 11
So, using pattern identification based on visitor time spent on a page and movement doesn't necessarily penalize the good sites, and it could likely be used to red-flag the bad ones for special treatment.
Plus, it would be only one factor. Let's say that site A and site B both have visitors leaving after viewing only one page. Site A is a dictionary, and site B is a scraper site. Site A is likely to have quality inbound links and a low SEO "spam quotient," while site B is likely to have few (if any) quality inbound links while having site characteristics that make Google's virtual nose wrinkle in any sniff test. Furthermore, site B's users are likely to be leaving via ads or the back button, while site A's users may not have such obvious departure patterns. Given the preponderance of evidence, it wouldn't be unreasonable for Google to assume that site B's lack of stickiness suggests poor quality, while site A's lack of stickiness is neither good nor bad.
Seos and website owners are the only people in the world doing that stuff for all practical purposes, try to think like average searchers, nobody here is an average searcher, the overwhelming majority of users does a search, then either stays on the page, looks at it for a bit, or comes back right away. I believe the patent application referred to this exact behavior though I can't remember the exact wording.
What about people who are shopping for something? They may go to several sites from more than one SERP before they find what they were looking for.
Another reason people may not stay is if there is a long article, one that could be well researched and perhaps with some great up to date information. But people tend to take one glance at a long article and just move on.
I run a few small directories and this is even easy for me to do with my visitors, and I don't have toolbar data, Adsense data, Urchin data, etc. One of Google's patents mentions using previous search criteria to customize new searches for specific users. If Google is aware that when my mother searches for "Turkey" she is looking for recipes and not a geo-location, they certainly know I'm a webmaster with certain search bias's.
And I'm sure Google has a special category for those of us who continually search using the 'site:command'.
I wonder how many of us have helped our competitors by searching our target keywords and clicking on their listings? How much time do YOU spend viewing scraper sites, trying to figure out how to destroy them? Maybe you are inadvertantly improving their rankings.
This will be a serious kill for the new sites.Sandbos and now this one?
i donno where these google people are heading for.
This is a perfect none issue. Until Google implements something why start a row over something that does not exist? Repeatedly in this set of forums advix=se is given on what to do. Why not just follow the advice and stop worrying about the sky falling?
