Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
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]
I know a niche site, very focused, and totally original nice content. Their visitors are currently all type-in or from MSN and yahoo. No adsense on the site yet.
For some 3 weeks in March, they were in SERPs. Its a new site, so rankings were nothing great but they were there. Around 300 visitors a day from Google in that period.
Then the pages vanished from Google, and only the homepage remained.
For me, for a niche and new site, the traffic from Google when their pages appeared in SERPS should have at least kept them somewhere in the SERPs, at least deep down in the index.
That doesn't seem to be happening.
One of my own new sites with again excellent content (its an experiment, but I wrote 200 articles for that) has been supplemental forever - once it escaped supp hell and traffic shot up. Back to supp, and no traffic.
That shot at traffic seems to happen - but with no impact for the future.
Does traffic influence Googlebot visitation frequency and, if so, to what degree?
Once we came out of supplemental hell, our traffic numbers picked up suddenly, and I also saw our pageviews/visit increase. Accordingly, I saw the site climb in the SERPs. However the problem that sits with any such conjecture like this is that the conclusions can never really be isolated from other contributing factors.
For example, of course I was also building links and I had added some content a while back. Did the content finally hit? Or was it one of the links that carried quite a bit of weight?
2 of my top 10 referrers are extremely strange sites that are displaying AdWords AND Yahoo Search Ads on their sites simultaneously. My site does not do AdSense or YPN. The sites look too cookie-cutter to have gone through the rigorous Google search partner approval process. The traffic has been extremely low quality for us and results in 98% bounce rates, therefore the terrible # of pageviews/visitor (1.1) could be really impacting the site negatively.
<snip>
I fear some real click fraud here, b/c one of these sites are showing ads in a very disturbing way. Potential value (ppc) of this traffic has already exceeded $10k. Has anyone else had to deal with this issue? Should I re-post this question somewhere else (although I thought since it had to do w/traffic #'s & Google...)?
Thanks in advance.
[edited by: engine at 2:34 pm (utc) on April 12, 2006]
[edit reason] No specific sites. [/edit]
New sites have a chance now?
Is user data the key to the true meaning of:
"There isn't a sandbox, but the algorithm might affect some sites, under some circumstances, in a way that a webmaster would perceive as being sandboxed."
As for a voting democracy, I've heard some compelling arguments in favour of a benevolent dictatorship, if Google could become just a little more benevolent, I'd be happy to oversee their human slaves in Google's underground PR mines....
Does anyone know if users can delete the toolbar on the Dell computers once they receive their new machine?s The toolbar really is spyware (as has already been mentioned) if you can't "opt out" by choice.
If the results are constantly rotated the little guy will have a chance
And where does that leave the user? Is that in his/her best interest? Users should recieve the best possible results ... not fed some "little guy's" site just because Google wants to "give them a chance".
I would say google is using the data
It's been around for a long time, and there are various ways to achieve it without major detriment to newer sites. But essentially, it would make for much more relevant SERPS. So I for one hope it continues to receive focus.
Google doesn't care about the little guy, it cares (or at least used to care) about delivering the highest quality results to their end-users. So rotating the top 10 or 50 wouldn't make much sense, would it?
Makes perfect sense. Leaving the top 10 or 50 static for extended periods wouldn't make much sense. First, that would leave no way of using click data to correct poor choices that the rest of the ranking algorithm has made. Second, that would leave no way to respond quickly to changes in user needs.
A page that contains the words "Brittney Spears" and "giraffe" might not deserve to rank highly for "Brittney Spears" today. But if she gets bitten by a giraffe tonight, that could change -- much faster than can be handled by the crawl-index-rank-export_to_datacenter cycle.
It's not as though Google has to constantly be making gigantic changes in the top 50. They merely have to conduct sampling tests periodically to see if it reveals that a lower-ranking listing is currently more relevant than those on page 1 or 2.
