Google algo moves away from links, towards traffic patterns

[travisk]

Does anyone else think that Google's actions over the last few years indicate a gradual change in the importance of traffic patterns over inbound links?

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]

[soapystar]

if wiki can rank for every subject under the sun simply by having the words on a single page that have no external inbounds and whether or not the page is actually about the subject..if they can rank above sites dedicated to the subject with good ontopic inbounds just how important are ontopic links?

[annej]

if wiki can rank for every subject under the sun simply by having the words on a single page that have no external inbounds

I think internal links are still pretty powerful. Big sites still rule. Not only wiki but that site that is "about" stuff.

Plus even though the specific page may not have much of any links from outside the site overall has tons of inbound links.

[soapystar]

but im not talking about pages with topical internal links.....im saying simply having the words on a page...where the page is NOT about the phrase..where the link anchor does NOT have the phrase....the page ranks FOR the phrase...it ranks above sites dedicated to the phrase...

[Trajano]

A ranking system mainly based on traffic patterns would led to a *STATIC RANKING* results for the most popular keywords. High traffic sites would improve thier ranking. Therefore their traffic would increase even more, reinforcing the high ranking.
On the other hand,low trafic sites would loose ranking. Therefore they would loose more traffic and finally would loose their ranking again.
It is a "retro-fed" system. You would not be able to put your new site on top, unless you get first a big traffic using other methods different from Google.

[otnot]

Trustrank?

[voices]

Okay lets try an experiment. Everyone do a search for George Foreman Grill, click on the number 1 link then go right back to the serps click on a different link and stay. Lets see if we can knock the number 1 listing down a notch. Big A is always up on top.

[europeforvisitors]

A ranking system mainly based on traffic patterns would led to a *STATIC RANKING* results for the most popular keywords. High traffic sites would improve thier ranking.

Why assume that "traffic patterns" is a synonym for "raw traffic," or that Google would be foolish enough to use the equivalent of Alexa traffic rankings to sort the results in its SERPs?

"Traffic patterns" can mean a lot of things that have been discussed in this thread, such as how users behave when they visit a page (perhaps in comparison to other pages of the same type). Time on page, page views per visit, whether users tend to return, etc. are just a few of the metrics that could fall under the heading of "traffic patterns"--and, of course, traffic patterns would never be the sole factor in determining how search results should rank.