Can visitors duration time affect Google Rankings?
-
Does the time a person stays on a website affect Search Rankings? If so, could the lower time from Adwords Visitors be effecting organic rankings? And the same for bounce rate.
If
Non-Paid Search Traffic Avg. Visit Duration time is 3:55
and
Paid Search Traffic Avg. Visit Duration is 1:59
Could the low duration time be affecting our website rankings?
-
That's a great question!
The thing is, there are websites that naturally have high bounce rates and low avg. visit duration time.
One example is Wikipedia: people google "what year did Titanic sink", get their answer and quit without visiting other pages. Can we say that high bounce rate or low avg. visit duration time negatively affects Wikipedia's rankings? No way!
I think the algorithm Google applies is more complex. The search engine might stereotype the web and assume that in case of insurance websites, for example, visit duration >N and bounce rate
-
Like Syed1 said, it could but probably not much. In light of Panda changes though, this is probably a metric they will start using to measure quality.
There was a blog post on SEOmoz a month ago that quoted Bing saying that they do pay attention to what they call "dwell time". http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-2-user-metrics-that-matter-for-seo The part about about dwell time was about half way down and here is the link from that blog post to what Bing had to say: http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2011/08/02/how-to-build-quality-content.aspx
-
It could. It shouldn't weigh in heavily as 'time on site' does not always equate to quality of page or even the relevancy of the page. Some pages are more useful when short and the 'action' perhaps does not consume a lot of time but I assume Google looks at industry or "website type" averages, sets benchmarks and considers accordingly. This is what I 'think' - not something successfully tested and proven.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
PDFs With No Index Contribute To Page Ranks?
I have a question I'm hoping you can help me with. If I upload a PDF and add a no index under the meta robots index so that the PDF doesn't appear in search results when I send people the link to this PDF, does it still contribute to my site traffic/ranking etc? Basically we are deciding whether to put some PDFs with pricing options etc onto our website or on a google drive. We will be sending the links to potential clients. If visitors clicking on the link would still help with increasing traffic and increasing our google rank (without that PDF showing in results) we thought this might be the best solution.
Algorithm Updates | | whiterabbitnz0 -
Will Google discount new gTLDs?
I have the opportunity now to acquire a very desirable generic domain name with either the .org or .pro TLD. Obviously, the .pro version I can get for a far better price. The .org will probably end up being about 10x the price of the .pro. I feel like the .org would give me instant clout while the .pro might raise eyebrows. Also, I'm concerned that Google might also discount these new gTLDs. What do you guys think? Is the perceived authority of the old-time TLDs something worth investing in? Or will this fizzle away over time as the new gTLDs flood the market? THanks! Ira
Algorithm Updates | | iraweissman0 -
Half my ranks have gone missing
I have a site that was rankly very highly for gaming walkthrough phrases. I was ranking #3 for the phrase skyward sword walkthrough Then it began to drop, despite me building more links (non spammy links) through guest blogs and emailing people requesting they just link to it from their site. I went in and added more text to the page and it went up a few places but is now gone from the first 5-10 pages. This has also happened to all of my walkthrough related ranks. My other ranks are still there but these accounted for a large portion of my traffic and is very odd. My on-page grade is near if not perfect my page Some insight would be nice
Algorithm Updates | | webfeatseo0 -
How to show your ratings in the Google SERP
I've noticed that some organic search results are showing ratings just above the meta tag. How are these sites doing this? Example: If you search "cash advance", there is a result between #4 and #6 in the organic results. The site is "goldcashadvance.com". It's showing a 5-star rating in the result.
Algorithm Updates | | sparagi0 -
Google Places/Points of Interest Rankings?
Does anyone have an idea on how Google ranks or determines the 'Points of Interests' that come up when searching about places/cities?
Algorithm Updates | | CarlLarson0 -
After optimising for SEO my ranking went down...
Hello, My website was ranking for over 100 keywords but was not really optimised properly. For example, the page title was much too long, it was segmented like this: "keyword - Category - domain " I followed recommandations in SEOMOZ and I removed the domain and category from the long page titles to only leave the keyword and updated the H1 to reflect also the keyword. We dropped in ranking since even though we did not change anything, only made things more SEO optimised. I don't understand how it made us drop in ranking?? David
Algorithm Updates | | DavidSpivac0 -
Another Domain ranking instead of my Domain
Hi My Domain name is Replicahause.net, 2 weeks ago my server had an outage for 3 days and my rankings dissappeared in google entirely, however i also noticed that when i typed in my domain name "replicahause" or "replicahause.net" , i would see abhishekyadav.com appearing on #1 in google which does a 301 into Replicahause.net I was able to convince the owner of Abhishekyadav to remove the 301 but my site Replicahause.net's Rankings still does not appear to have come back to google, is there something i'm missing here ? We were ranked #1 to #10 for at least 40 keywords, they've just seemed to dissappeard after the server downtime we had and the 301 from AbhishekYadav.com Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | jansimon0 -
Is there a way to pull historical rankings for a keyword?
I have someone who's come to me and said that they have lost all of their organic keyword rankings. They did launch a site redesign a few months back so that could be a reason as to why. But after looking at the site, link profile, etc. It doesn't look like they could have been ranking for the terms they say they were. They have never implemented any SEO on their sites btw. I did not build this site and have not done any SEO, they are coming to me to solve the problem. I did notice in SEM rush that a couple months ago they were ranking organically for more terms (20 in July vs. 5 now), so they did lose some. Is there any way to see what terms they WERE ranking for?
Algorithm Updates | | MichaelWeisbaum0