Traffic have anything to do with it?

[kch333]

Site A owned high pr, maybe pr5 or pr6, but it owned only about 100 visitors or less every day.

Site B owned low pr, maybe only pr2 or pr3, but it owned as much as 2000 persons to visit every day.

Google would ignore the quantities of visitors and give better result for Site A?

kch333

[Dino_M]

Site A would get the better rankings due to it's PR.

As far as i'm aware user stats are not a factor in the google algo.

Which would you choose? Which would I rather own or which would I rather buy?

[seindal]

Google cannot know how many visitors a site has.
Where should it get the information from?

René.

[korkus2000]

Google really can't monitor traffic AFAIK. I would want site b myself. PR is not as important as traffic.

[Dino_M]

I would rather own site B as trafic means more than PR.

but I may be tempted to buy the PR6, as it has obviously not been making the best use of it's Pr to get users which I could improve on.

[jackofalltrades]

Site B must be getting its traffic from somewhere that isnt links to other sites.

Its possible that Site B has particullarly good content and therefore ranks well in the SERPs, but it just doesnt have many inbound links.

Site A is most likely a new site where the webmaster has covered the SEO basics of getting good links.

Id go for site B!

:)

JOAT

[anoryu]

I would buy both and link the two, letting them feed off of eachother. the visitor rate would help the site with the good content and good pr and the good content and high pr would help the site with the visitor rate.(this of course being the best of all possible worlds).

[europeforvisitors]

Its possible that Site B has particullarly good content and therefore ranks well in the SERPs, but it just doesnt have many inbound links.

That's a good point about content. Relevance trumps PageRank in many cases, IMHO.

Another possibility is that Site B has inbound links to one or more secondary pages that generate a lot of traffic.

[espeed]

> Google cannot know how many visitors a site has.
> Where should it get the information from?

Statistical estimate based on traffic monitors in the Google Toolbar.

[Slade]

> Google cannot know how many visitors a site has.
> Where should it get the information from?

Statistical estimate based on traffic monitors in the Google Toolbar.

Occasionally google's SERPs have tracking links rather than straight clickthroughs. Not very often, but I've see it asked a few times on the board here.

[tmott]

OK . . must admit this is just a hunch here, but I gotta believe that Google is able to estimate overall site popularity and/or traffic at least to some degree, and if so, that would be a good indicator of what other users might find interesting and helpful.

In our category, there is a MAJOR widget supply chain that is ALWAYS number one, no matter what (and there is some serious competition in this category). There is another MAJOR catalog/internet operation that is almost always number two.

There are a couple of ways in which I think they could measure popularity.

1. They know how many times people search for store number one or store number two by name.

2. The google toolbar relays info back to Googleplex about people's usage to some degree. How much? Not sure. I think they know more than we know they know (if you know what I mean).

Well, that's my theory/hunch. Go ahead and shoot holes in it and I will not take it personally.

[hurlimann]

>Google cannot know how many visitors a site has.

Surely it can for coming from google. Add toolbar stats and as a measure for factoring PR it seems a winner if serps position is factored in.

God only knows what stress these calculations whould have on their systems?

[Rick_M]

I have seen two occasions in the last few months when the google search results included tracking links (like the yahoo results - which could be another source for google getting popularity results, depending on their agreement). Interestingly, the most recent time I saw the tracking links was right after the last google dance started. I am wondering if they used those findings to adjust their rankings as they moved from www2 and 3 to www. It sure makes for an interesting additional factor in the google rankings!