Google toolbar for SEO

another black hat SEO? effective or not?

[mr_stoned]

I heard that if you download a Google toolbar, open an internet explorer,go to google.com, type your keyword, find your website and click on your website; THIS WILL INCREASE YOUR RESULTS RANKINGS?

This is because Google toolbar collects behavioral data from its users and if you tell alot of ppl to click your website, Google will think your website should be ranked high?

[DXL]

Not to my knowledge.

The only thing that I know for a fact you can manipulate are Alexa ratings by downloading their toolbar and visiting your site frequently, but Alexa scores don't amount to much to most people.

[caveman]

There is no question that G is capturing data via the toolbar.

However, I do not believe personally that they are using it much or at all for the SERP's.

First, it is easy to spam, and potentially hard to detect certain kinds of spam (although, repeitive hits would be easy enough to spot, and probably a lame thing to do; why attract that kind of attention?).

Second, how to they anaylze the data? People's click patterns vary widely depending upon, just to name a few measures:
--personality of the surfer
--category the site is in
--intent of the user (research=more clicks, ready to buy something=fewer clicks)
--nature of the search term
--time of day
--day of week

Honestly, it would be almost impossible to sort it all out and the potential for error is huge.

[SEOMumbai]

If you or all the people you tell to do it, do it all day long, it would amount to spamming. Even if you do it only a few times a day, it wont be effective. Google will know you are repeatedly searching a keyword and clicking on a website. Steer clear of the toolbar in case of SEO. It passes on more info than you can guess.

[jbinbpt]

The toolbar does have the voting buttons. I doubt many people even know about them or even use them.
No one knows what happens to that information? Why have them unless they are asking for input about a sites quality?

[Ecaterina]

how many times you have to do this to be relevant? And from the same IP, or you think runing around your city/country and clicking...

But I am paranoic regarding google tracking data from toolbar. so paranoic that, after working for 4 months to a site (off-line), I had to spend another 4-5 days testing it online, so I've set up an subdomain (test.mydomain,com) to my unused domain (mydomainn.com) . Then, during testing on subdomain, I've used only Opera (I have google toolbar on my IE). I was afraid of indexing (through toolbar) the content at subdomain address, then to have duplicate content on mydomain.com... I hope just paranoic, but I am almost sure G. follows you even if writting the URL only in the address bar, not toolbar.