Visited stats affecting rankings?
-
If visitor stats affect rankings should we be worried as we are making our website probably the most user friendly useful site in our field but this includes cutting down the time it takes for a user to order and our pages are also one page so all the information is there and easy to use the problem is this results in 1 page visits and probably one of the lowest visit times of our industry.
Say for example a user sees all of the information and and gets a quote another website has 5 pages the users spends more time and visits more pages to find how to order but they eventually leave after they have give up would this site win via Google user stats?
-
Not sure what it's going to take to kill this theory that visitor stats are used as a ranking factor, but here's some food for thought.
Google has shown repeatedly that their primary focus for ranking factors is things which can be consistently applied to all sites, and are hard to fake or game. (And they work very hard to punish sites they do catch faking or gaming ranking signals.)
The only way they could gather these visitor traffic signals is by jacking into your Google Analytics or Adwords/Adsense accounts
- Google Analytics is used on a little over 60% of websites. So Google would be ignoring over 40% of websites (including many of the really big players who use enterprise analytics like WebTrends, SiteCatalyst etc)
- using data from Adwords/Adsense would be even more unreliable as an even smaller percentage of sites use these.
- incorrect implementation of tracking codes causes completely inaccurate Analytics data. I see this on new client sites all the time
- in 30 seconds I can adjust your website to have Analytics report any Bounce Rate you want.
- another trivial tweak to your site's code and I can have Analytics report double or triple your pageviews.
Bottom line, trying to track visitor stats is far too unreliable and easily manipulated, not to mention outside their own terms of service.
On top of that, Matt Cutts is on record as categorically stating that Google does not use visitor stats as ranking signals. (I was in the room at SMX Advanced last year when he said it.
** The one exception to this is Google's use of bounce rate from the actual SERP pages. It's widely considered that having a user click on your site from a SERP, then quickly bounce back to the SERP for another search is an indication of negative quality of your site.
In addition to all of the above, as you yourself state, Bob, there are many sites where a short time on site and few pages viewed can be indication of a site that does its job very well. IMO Google's not dumb enough to measure all sites with the same yardstick like that.
Hope that makes sense.
Paul
-
Bob,
You have posed a question that is a Pandora's box of conflicting opinions. So, off the the opinions, etc.
First, for my money, the best read for analytics knowledge is Avinash Kaushik whose blog is Occams Razor. About a year ago he had a very thought provoking post on choosing what KPI's you use wisely. And this is a bit of your dilemma.
You start with "If visitor stats affect ranking..." and then the question assumes certain facts not in evidence: Pageviews are a factor in ranking, time on site is a factor in ranking, bounce rate is a factor in ranking, etc.IMO , if they are, they are small factors. Assume your problem looks this way: We have a site that now provides the quickest and easiest way for our industry to get a needed group of products. The ease of use and the rapidity with which a product can be found are staggering and we are seeing more and more conversions as the result. Is Google's algorithm going to cause us to lose SERP ranking as the result? I think the answer is NOPE.
Are you seeing more and more visits? Uniques? etc.? If things are as you say they are my guess would be yes you are. Congratulations.
In our shop we have a few clients. I do not know a one who would complain about more visits and more sales, even if they dropped in ranking. But, the good news is, you won't if all you say here is true. But,
If your info supplied here is anecdotal and based on a common belief that "Our site is better than the other guys because we built it.", then, well things may work out differently.
I urge you to read the post by Avinash as it is really enlightening. Simply put, a great question from it is this: if a site has a lot of visits and lower time on site and page views is that because people did not find what they wanted? or, Is it because they found what they wanted and took care of business? IMO, Google gets there are two correct answers.
Hope this helps,
Best
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
-
Can I know which keywords lost their top rankings on google a year ago if the client didn't checked the keyword rankings in his website?
Hi, Can I know which keywords lost their top rankings on google a year ago if the client didn't checked the keyword rankings in his website? Thanks Roy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kadut1 -
Ranking in SERPs but not using terms on website.
As far as I know, it's not normally possible for a website to rank for a keyword that is not mentioned on the website. I have seen a website that ranks very well for key terms and yet they are not mentioned anywhere on the website, I have run advanced search & checked using tools including cloak checker on my findings. How can this be?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lee-murphy0 -
Not ranking in Google - why???
This will be a bit long, so please bare with me. I have a client in the auto parts industry who wants to rank their homepage for 13 different keywords. We are ranked first page for all keywords in Yahoo! Mexico and Bing Mexico, but not ranking first page at all in Google Mexico. My client's competitor, however, is clearly outranking my client in Google. When comparing both pages, my client's, while not 100% optimized, looks better optimized than their competitor's. Looking at all metrics using Moz, SEMRush, ahrefs, etc... my client's site looks MUCH better on all fronts. I know ranking a single homepage for more than 10 keywords is a difficult task. Our competitor is however, ranking for them, so it's not impossible. The keywords are not even that competitive according to Moz's analysis. I decided to create an optimized page for each keyword to try to rank these pages, but still my client wants the homepage to rank (again, if the competitor is ranking, then it's possible to do this) and I am afraid these pages I created could result in keyword cannibalization ultimately affecting the homepage's possibility to rank. My client had a previous SEO agency working for them and basically all they did was create fake blogs and have lots of keyword rich links directed to the site's homepage. I got the complete link profile from several tools and submitted a disavow requests for as many fishy links I could find, but that hasn't shown any results so far. Note: when looking at the competitor link profile, they have basically just a few links and no external links of real value whatsoever. My client is obviously very frustrated, and so am I. In my SEO experience, it shouldn't be such a difficult task to accomplish, however nothing seems to work even though everything seems to point that my client should rank higher. So now I'm running out of ideas regarding what to do with this site. Any insight you could provide would be SO helpful to me and my client. If needed I can provide my client's homepage URL and also their competitors homepage for you to review. i can also give you any extra information you need. Thanks a lot!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EduardoRuiz0 -
Why Keyword Ranking Fluctuate?
Hi All, I have a shoes website and I am working on it from last four months. I am targeting four main keywords but I have some issues with ranking. First one is that keywords ranking fluctuate many time a day but they remain on the same page. Second one is that these keywords remain on the same page for 2 to 3 week and than suddenly they drop down in the ranking. Please help me regarding these issue. Waiting for replies. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cuttingseo0 -
How many links would you need to rank up in page rank?
White hat **** Can 20 website with page rank of 3 make your site rank higher?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | spidersite0 -
Rankings for keyword variations dropped over weekend?
One of our clients has seen significant decreases over the weekend for a number of keyword variations. There have been no significant site changes, no crawl errors reported and our competitors don't seem to have been affected. The decrease has coincided with the launch of a display campaign, but surely this is just coincidental? Any thoughts would be appreciated...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zealmedia0 -
Key page of site not ranking at all
Our site has the largest selection of dog clothes on the Internet. We're been (every so slowly) creeping up in the rankings for the "dog clothes" term, but for some reason only rank for our home page. Even though the home page (and every page on the domain) has links pointing to our specific Dog Clothes page, that page doesn't even rank anywhere when searching Google with "dog clothes site:baxterboo.com". http://www.google.com/webhp?source=hp&q=dog+clothes+site:baxterboo.com&#sclient=psy&hl=en&site=webhp&source=hp&q=dog+clothes+site:baxterboo.com&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=dog+clothes+site:baxterboo.com&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=f4efcaa1b8c328f Pages 2+ of product results from that page rank, but not the base page. It's not excluded in robots.txt, All on site links to that page use the same URL. That page is loaded with more text that includes the keywords. I don't believe there's duplicated content. What am I missing? Has the page somehow been penalized?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BBPets0 -
Website Ranking Issue
Hey All My question is specfic to a particular website. The category of the website is Kitchen Appliances. The keyword is extremely competitive. The website I am currently optimizing has loads of products and many pages as well. I am constantly building links from industry specific websites for the website as well as composing articles and leading the users back to the website with keyword rich anchor text. I have been doing this for around 3 months and I do not see the website in the first 30 pages of the SERP (for the keyword kitchen appliances - the site is a page rank 2 BTW). No bugs reported as well in Webmaster tools. My next step is to add these articles to the website (www.example.com/KitchenAppliances ) with keyword rich metatags as well as content with internal links to my product pages. I also plan on sending traffic to these pages to build the pages link popularity. Do you think I can expect better results for the article pages than my original website product pages or do you think I should continue with the link building activity I was performing originally for the website. regards Ryan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO5Team2