When consumers query you by name, I believe Google will begin to associate their search behavior with user satisfaction, what users want when they query certain terms.
The SERPs are not the top ten ordered by "best" links. Nor are they ordered by relevance to a search query. They're ordered by what's going to satisfy the user. That's not a ranking signal. That's a user provided signal.
Do you believe it's possible, given there's so much research on optimizing search engines with user feedback, that in order to build better rankings, it may be a good idea to optimize for people, with user experience, popularity, name recognition, and value adds that make you better than your competition?
This discusses a way to mine click data to learn what satisfies users
Modifying search result ranking based on implicit user feedback: [
google.com...]
This discusses a way to associate a name used in a search query with web pages to show in the SERPs:
Associating resources with entities [
google.com...]
CTR Data is Noisy - How to Overcome it to Train Algorithms - 2010
Improving Quality of Training Data for Learning to Rank Using Click-Through Data [
wsdm-conference.org...]
Important Paper that Gives Background on using CTR Data. It's circa 2002, which shows just how far back minding click data goes. This isn't something new. Around 2003 GoogleGuy mentions that Google users click data for quality control. This is a good paper to read if you're fuzzy on this but also, for a reality check that CTR data mining isn't new.
Optimizing Search Engines using Clickthrough Data
[
cs.cornell.edu...]
