Do uniques improve ranking? What does Google count as unique?

[memario]

When a visitor comes in my site, he is counted for a unique visitor.
I imagine that after 24 hours his second visit will be counted just for a visit.
So am I right of thinking that this visitor will never be counted as a unique visitor anymore, no matter if he make his second visit after 1 day, 1 week or 1 year ?

How are unique visits and normal visits reflecting site's ranking?
I've heard that more visits ranks you up, but are only unique ones do that? Which on has more weight?

Best regards.

[tristanperry]

>> no matter if he make his second visit after 1 day, 1 week or 1 year

It depends on the time period. If your analytics software is showing a monthly view, then a visitor's second visit 1+ month after the first visit would be counted as (another) unique visit. However if the second visit was within a month, it wouldn't be. So for time period n, a second visit less than n days/weeks/month from the first visit would not be a unique visit; and the converse is also true.

>> How are unique visits and normal visits reflecting site's ranking?

I don't think they have any bearing to be honest.

[memario]

Thanks for the explanation.
So if visits doesn't help for ranking, the most important thing is links/back links. As for now I was living in illusion that site visits and links are one of the most important ranking factors.
Thanks for clearing up this to me.

[tedster]

I wouldn't completely discount visits as "a" factor - especially visits that come from clicking on a Google search results page.

But you're right to assume that it's not as big as backlinks. And that mostly means strong backlinks, freely given by someone who wants to recommend your site to their visitors. Backlinks you can place at-will have MUCH smaller effect.

[aakk9999]

And that mostly means strong backlinks, freely given by someone who wants to recommend your site to their visitors. Backlinks you can place at-will have MUCH smaller effect.

How does Google distinguish between the two? OK, we can discount links in forums, blog comments, link exchange pages etc. But if there is an in-content one-way link from a site to your site, how would Google know whether this link was "freely given editorial" or not?

[pitbullfan]

But if there is an in-content one-way link from a site to your site, how would Google know whether this link was "freely given editorial" or not?

I'm no expert, but I think it would be hard to tell, even for Google. Now a caveat to that would be an in-content one way link from a site known to "freely give" links that are paid for.

[tedster]

They might not be able to tell the difference between a one-off arrangement and an editorial link.

However, once they detect a pattern (with either the target site or the linking site) then things can start to fall apart, especially if their algo "suspects" money is involved. That particular bit of machine learning has at least two years of training at this point, probably more.

[memario]

I'll tell you why I made this thread.
Couple of days ago I noticed that my site was going down on my main most important keyword. So I thought that I must do something about it. I started to read some SEO stuff... and in the end of the day I did two major stuff for my site. First: my site has only 9 pages (including index page) and its on two languages, so overall 18 pages. What I did was inserting a keyword link to my index page, on every page in the site. And the second thing is that I spread the word. I did it to my skype friend list, FB and so on. And at this day I had a big peak in my visits. After all this procedures (which took about 5 hours) I checked my google ranking again. And I was up with 7 positions. I was standing on 3th page 9 place for 2 weeks already. And now for a couple of hours I raised to 3th page 1st place. I couldn't know which factor made such an influence to my ranking, the internal links or the visits. Now I'm pretty sure that the internal links are making most of the work, but now you can see why asked my question in the beginning.