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Perhaps an interesting question on which I do not know the answer.
Does Google give you extra points when lots of people click to your site from the Google search results?
For example, I have two websites (A and B) with an equal value, say PR 5.
Because of a bad snippet for site 'A', most of the people click on site 'B'.
Will this in time result that site B will rank higher than site A?
The links in the Google results are plain links, not using Javascript or something else. For as far as I know it would not te possible to track these links.
So I guess Google cannot add points with their current way of linking.
What do you all think about this matter?
And if Google doesn't measure the usage throught the search results do you think it does this using the Google Toolbar?
I'm curious what you all have to say about this!
Regards,
Wouter
My personal opinion on this matter is that Google does not track clickthroughs, however, they should.
Ive been doing a large amount of search engine theory research lately and believe that tracking the click throughs could be an invaluable asset to providing not only more relevant results, but also personalised results.
Id like to hear some of the older members opinions on this. Ive started a related thread [webmasterworld.com] for this topic.
Ian
[edited by: iseff at 5:34 pm (utc) on July 1, 2003]
That's right - they can't. Sometimes the result links are rewritten to tracking url's but that's really rare and just for specific searches.
>do you think it does this using the Google Toolbar?
Definetly! I'm pretty sure they use all data they can get to improve reults quality and increase targeted ad sales.
With the toolbar in combination with 'advanced features' they have a better way to find out which pages are really viewed (although it could be abused like other parts of the algo).
And if Google doesn't measure the usage throught the search results ...
That's right - they can't. ...
Well they could, theoretically, do that - apart from the use of tracking URLs, the users of the full Google Toolbar transmit every URL they visit to Google when the toolbar retrieves the PR number for the URL from Google.
BTW anyone know what "sa=U" mean?
On the other hand, using the Google toolbar is a good thing, I think, since it tracks where people go regardless of how they get there.
Like a few people said, i think they use the toolbar a lot more than we think they do.
that would make it harder for small and new sites to move up since the first few results would get most of the hits. That's a reward for getting high up in the SERPs, not for having a good site.
How many clicks for position1? position2? position3? ...
How many clicks for page1? page2? page3? ...
The result could be then analyzed and correlate with the success or failure of their algorithm.
Hypothetical example:
Suppose there are many click throughs going to page 2 and very few for page 1. Not that Google will boost the sites ranking listed at page 2 for that query but instead will tweak the algo to reflect what the searchers want.
I really like the way they handle Adwords in that they reward advertisers that have higher click rates and dynamically increase that sites position.
You always find a few sites that don't really fit in the results, sometime they are completely off topic.
Since google puts so much stock in DMOZ, why not use a hybrid model between DMOZ and Adwords dynamic listings.
Track click rates on keyword results and drop sites that receive a lower than expected result compared to other sites that are returned. In turn reward those site that receive a higher number of clicks expected for its listing position.
I often skip many of the results and click only the most pertinent. Granted Basically using users as human editors.
BTW anyone know what "sa=U" mean?
The basic pattern is:
www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=[b]<num1>[/b]&q=[b]<url>[/b]&e=[b]<num2>[/b]The <num1> part is easy, that's the ranking on the SERP from '1' to maximal '1000'.
The <url> is the URL of the page in the SERP.
Usually <num2> is 747, but on msg 5 on the thread Google Recording Clickthroughs [webmasterworld.com] you can see a link to a page where they are all '1102'. This looks like an end tag but the value is no checksum.
The 'start' parameter is also popping up in URL, if you go to the second page of the SERP. In that case the end of the URL is like "&start=xx&sa=N" where xx is the number of results on a SERP (default 10). So also in this case there is a parameter 'sa' next to 'start'. The first part of the URL is also different ('www.google.com/url' or 'www.google.com/search'), but still the 'sa' and 'start' look related. First I was hoping that 'N' stands for 'Next', but going from page 3 to page 2 also has 'sa=N'.
The adwords at the right hand side of the SERP, also go through 'www.google.com/url' and have an 'sa' parameter ('sa=l'). Now the 'start' parameter is not used, but the adds are counted with 'num' (starting from 'num=1').
So the 'sa' parameter is rather confusing. I think only people with inside knowledge can tell. And they won't. :(
