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]

[travisk]

Cleanup, the PHD's at Google who create and tune the algos probably have very little to do with the everyday bugs that you are complaining about. This company employs thousands of employees. They can concentrate on more than one thing at a time.

[CainIV]

The idea sounds accurate, but to me it makes no sense as it would simply allows big sites that pay much money for Adsense and already have high listing and traffic to continue to dominate.

[annej]

There would have to be another component or new sites would't have a chance not matter how good they were. You have to be able to get up there to get the high traffic to get the high rankings to get the high traffic. And on and on.

I guess buying ads would help but how else could a new site ever be noticed?

[idolw]

links = votes
like in a democratic country. there is no better pattern. at least no one found it out, yet.

the problem is to answer the question:
"are millions of votes of anonymous people more important than few votes from important personalities?"

traffic patterns may be cool if that leads to get rid of the websites with AdSense and affiliate links which are only doorways forward (I mean user spends short time at these sites).
Unless the above sites are directories ;)

[walkman]

Traffic? This would mean that a search engine is the last to know /show that you're popular.

[travisk]

Too much oversimplification here.

Don't think "traffic". Think "user behavior". If 100 visitors search for "widgets", click the first site (which happens to be the most popular), but then return to the search page and click on the third site (less popular), but then never come back to the search page, the search engine may use that AS A FACTOR indicating that what the searchers were looking for was found on the third site, not the first.

[lammert]

With statistical analysis, you don't need sustained traffic to a site to know if it is liked by surfers or not. I see periodic posts here of people with new sandboxed sites which are visible in the Google SERPs for a few days, then disappear. After some time there is a new spike and the site disappears again. With these type of test samples, Google can make a good statistical analysis of the acceptance of a site by the visitors: do they stay on the site, or are they coming back to the SERPs to select another listing.

Maybe the sandbox is nothing more than a group of guinea-pig sites for Google's traffic pattern analysis algorithms. They are new so no visitor knows them and therefore it doesn't hurt the user experience if they are not visible. If during a test traffic spike the user acceptance is high, the site remains in the SERPs which can be confirmed by the fact that some sites don't seem to have a sandbox problem at all.

[Liane]

They're paying Dell a billion dollars to install it onto 100 million consumer PC's.

Although I know Dell has some pretty nice (and pricey) machines, I still perceive them to be (mainly) on the lower end of the consumer market. I could be entirely wrong ... but that's how I see Dell.

Will Google really get a reliable cross section of the world market from a tool bar on Dell machines? Or will they mainly get the lower end of the consumer market. In other words, are high ticket items likely to be sold to Dell computer owners?

[trinorthlighting]

Dell computers are at the top of the corporate world. Most major corporations buy from dell. Think about it, most people now days surf the net from work. So they are not only getting low end consumers, they are also getting corporate america as well......

They want their toolbar and search tools used instead of MSN's products...... They have to pay to put theirs on top of MSN's new tools that will soon be out..... Microsoft will have all their tools built in.... Google has to grasp at straws like this or Microsoft will eventually eat them up.

[econman]

Interesting thread.

One tiny bit of evidence suggesting that Google may already be using user data more than we realize:

We have a domain that we use for operational purposes. If you were to visit this domain, you would just see a splash page indicating the site is under construction. However, for various internal purposes we access this domain quite actively.

Perhaps as a result of our activity, I recently noticed the splash page has an Alexa ranking of roughly 100,000.

What is interesting is that the splash page also has a google PR of 5, despite having no inbound links that I am aware of, and despite the fact that Google, Yahoo and MSN all indicate it has zero inbound links.

Perhaps the PR 5 is due to our internal visits to the domain, using browsers that have alexa and/or google toolbars installed?