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]

[4string]

Do links being emailed via gmail get noticed in any way? People sharing a link could help determine quality, too.

[DoingItWell]

So - if the algo uses data from adsense ads, does this mean that it is no longer a good idea to wait a while with putting ads on new websites, but to get them on and collecting visit data as soon as possible?

[Rosalind]

One thing that's been hard to ignore lately is the rise and rise of social bookmarking. These sites rely entirely on user-provided data, and seem on the face of it easy to game. Yet the sheer volume of data from different people means that they produce surprisingly relevant results.

With this in mind, Google's move towards increasing use of traffic patterns and data supplied by consumers seems inevitable.

[matt21811]

If this is true then sites with forums will get a boost as users tend to spend a bit of time perusing them. For blackhats, I suppose it would be posible to fake or perhaps steal a large amount of content from other forums to fill one up.
It would be entirely posible for spyware to sneak onto a machine unoticed and for it to send out traffic that appears to be surfing the web when in fact the machine looks and behaves totally normally to the user. For spyware makers there is an advantage in that it does not have to interupt the user to do its job. In fact, the more unoticable it is, the better it is.
I see a future with Botnets for lease. Have your site surfed from up to 100,000 real users machines, at random times and your site nicely intermixed with the users natural surfing patterns.

[matt21811]

I had another idea to exploit this.
Small ISPs could be persuaded (with money) to let you observe their traffic with a machine that you provide. Over time you could build a large number of real google cookies (or whatever identifier they use) matched with IP addresses and then use this info to spoof surfing activity to your own sites. Once again the spoofing is mixed with the normal surfers activities making it hard to detect.
There would be no impact to users machines and so nothing ilegal would be occuring. The only cost to the ISP is a trivial amount of extra traffic.

[old_expat]

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

Vote buying is rampant in many countries. Influence is bought by lobbyists .. has nothing at all to do with democracy ...

Link buying is rampant in cyberspace. It's all about money and getting more so.

However, vote buying is impossible in a dictatorship. Hmm ..

[annej]

1. How many people went to that site
2. How long did people spend on that site (or page)

Is there any relationship between ranking in the top 10 on matching search word & phrases and time on site?

People using search engines tend to spend less time on sites as they search around compared people going to a site with a direct link like a bookmark, email or newsletter or a link from a related site.

So I would think the pages ranked highly would get shorter visits. Am I was off base here?

What I'm leading up to is that pages at the top in the serps may actually lose if the serps are based on time on the site.

[ronburk]

This will make it virtually impossible for the little guy to succeed. The top 10 results will be based on the well established sites.

Wrong.

• Google can (and has, in my opinion) throw lower-ranked listings up towards the top periodically to test whether they are attractive to visitors. This gives little guys a shot at proving they have something relevant that Google users want. (Increases the importance of crafting your SERP listing well -- just like AdWords advertisers get big rewards for crafting their ads so they appeal to users).
  
• The keyword space is huge. Well-established sites tend to "pig-out" on relatively few keywords that are high-traffic. Pick any hyper-competitive term, and a little guy can still chip away at dozens of 4-word related terms with relative ease. Google always has and always will rely on the "long tail" for their success -- that means they remain sensitive to giving the little guy a shot at some traffic.
  
• The well-established sites often are structurally unable to go after the long tail -- or even the part of the tail that's just slightly less thick. The lions get the choice steak, but the vultures never go hungry -- and they never have to get into fights with lions.
  

A question nearer and dearer to me currently is: Does traffic influence Googlebot visitation frequency and, if so, to what degree?

[catch2948]

I agree with a lot of what is being said about how Google uses Adsense data. Knida makes me want to go back to using some of the other advertising options, like I did before Adsense came along.

Might not be as much money, but maybe my sites will be around longer :-)

[trimmer80]

Traffic patterns lead to a learning system. It would give google better control over what sites are satisfying the needs of the surfers.

eg. Surfer searches for blue widgets.
Clicks on the first result. Doesnt find the info they are looking for. Goes back to Google and clicks on the second result. Finds the information they were looking for and doesn't continue looking through the rest of the results.

Thus Google knows that result 2 was a better match than site 1. If this trend continues they may switch results.

It is auxilary to the normal algo. In that the normal algo would provide a starting point and then google would "tweak" results based on the user interact.

This system will help remove spammy sites and increase serp quality overall.