For Rankings, Does Traffic Even Matter?

[rintrah]

There's a lot of information on this site about page rank, optimization and the like, but when it comes to web pages and search engine rank - does traffic even matter?

Let's say there are two new pages, X and Y. X is optimized perfectly for a major search engine, but receives little traffic over a 6 month period.

Page Y isn't optimized at all, but through other means (enewsletters, affiliate programs etc), receives a ton of views.

Which page would climb the ranks first?

[Quinn]

Traffic is irrelevant. A search engine has no ideas how many visitors see any given site apart from those who arrive at that site through the search portal.

[agerhart]

x.

does traffic even matter?

Not in the slightest.

Instead of thinking in terms of one or the other, why not try to drive traffic from all sources possible? Optimize your site for the search engines, and at the same time pursue the other traffic sources.

[jeremy goodrich]

The page that is "optimized" will climb faster -> usage data is, at best, speculatively included in modern algorithms and at worst - definitely included, but hardly a 'major factor'.

Other stuff - site stature, site age, link popularity, on page optimization, theming, etc - will push a site further up the rankings faster than *any* amount of usage data / if it is being included.

<added>
*cough*

Which page would climb the ranks first?

*cough*

I believe that was the question - not whether traffis is important or not but rather -> does website usage help a site climb the rankings.

Unless I missed something? :)
</added>

[Quinn]

OK to clarify:

In general, traffic is not factor that is used by search engines to determine relevancy for any given search term.

That being said, in the past and perhaps in the future engines have used click-thru counters and use that data to some degree in determining relevancy.

So in these cases traffic did influence the sites position in the SERP, but only traffic that was coming through that SERP.

click....hangup....click....hangup

[jeremy goodrich]

Google has what % market share? ;) Their toolbar, with PR display enabled, phones home the sites you visit - so yes, they could be rolling that in to their algo.

[coconubuck]

Optimize your site for the search engines, and at the same time pursue the other traffic sources.....What other sources would you look at automatically? Are there any others or does it really just depend on your site?

[dcheney]

Although I doubt any of the major SE use traffic data per se at this time - but traffic (assuming once they find your site, they like it) is very likely to affect how many inbound links you get.

[NameNick]

IMO traffic could matters in different way. Say there is a given percentage of visitors that link to a website. There are probably not many of them and probably you would have to ask for a link in the first place.

But the high traffic site would obviously get more backlinks than the low traffic site. And finally those more backlinks would have an influence to the ranking of that page.

NN

[webdevsf]

Google has a very good idea of a site's traffic (at least from them) You'll occasionally see referals that look like

[google.com...]

That means google has tracked the clickthru and hence knows by sample size how much traffic you are getting from them.