Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
(the people who know the algo better will be able to help me here)
Say you have a visitor on one website who stays for 10 page views and then goes to another linked website and stays for 20 pages and then goes to another website for 5 pages - would this in fact create an illusion of relevency between the sites - and be one method by which to engineer authority sites ie get into one of these networks or get a current authority site to join such a network of yours and in so granting trust to your network?
There will probably be a massive detail I'm missing - log stats without much algorythm processing power.
...would this in fact create an illusion of relevency between the sites...
sandpetra - Your question isn't quite clear. Are you asking about whether Google might be using toolbar data (or spidered log data) to boost a site's "trust score"? If that's your question, I don't think it's likely.
I believe Google knows that such data can be manipulated. It would probably take a very large number of independent visits to affect Google's perception of a site, and my guess is that they'd be using this info more as a check against other factors, than to give a site a boost just because of toolbar visits.
Eg, if a site that gets a huge number of inbound links, but has shown almost no visitors, those links might be viewed with suspicion.
Unless an authority site actually links to you, thought, it's most likely not going to be adding to your trust or authority score, whatever those might be.
On the other hand, you can be sure that Google is somewhere keeping track of all the info they collect about your site, and visiting patterns are probably one thing they notice. This data is probably not used in the algo, but may well be correlated with other data Google collects, ultimately helping them make decisions about how the algo should work.
Not sure if I've addressed your question. Please elaborate further if I haven't. I should add that I don't actually know how the algo works, but that these are best guesses.
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 3:13 am (utc) on Mar. 20, 2007]
