Hi All, I've been bothering you with that topic for so long, but I've finally got the proof and now its official! Randy from 1st Rankings just made closely monitored experiment with 100 volunteers and proved that data is used for altering the Google search rankings, even thou with only low priority. I wrote a huge article on that please read it here: SEO proves that Google is using extensive User Behavioral Data as Website Ranking Criteria Please leave comments on that thread or on the website. Cheers and enjoy, Venetsian
Yep, I agree, this is just the top of the iceberg. I posted this here because I got a lot of DP members -- so called SEO's -- that laughed at me that this was pure bullshit and was never going to be used.. but guess what .. I proved to be right and I had to stick it up their faces .. Cheers bro, Venetsian
Um I got really no comment on this, but if this true as you proved I would add more meta tag for G Analytic
I'm not sure they can use analytics data to impact serps so dramatically when such a small sample of websites use google analytics......the data collected by the google toolbar is something else though
Yes, I was wondering myself if the toolbar can be used for such purposes, but I don't think it is at least to the extent that analytics is used to mine data. It is possible to gather some intel on websites from the toolbar and I guess it won't be very hard thing to do, but still until we get a solid proof we can't say anything. Cheers, Venetsian.
Yup, thats why I dropped their toolbar and will be removing their analytics soon. Google is spying in you..
Yeah, but what really bothers me here is that we can not be sure if we benefit from it or not ... really, if you have good quality site with nice amount of users, you do benefit out of the whole thing. Only if you're con then you get scre--ed, but that's Google's way of trying to improve their rankings ... Cheers, Venetsian
I wrote a post about it when it first came out awhile back. I still dont understand how they would do this or why they would because it can easily be manipulated. Anyways I made a blog posts when Google applied for a new patent and this information was included saying that Google does use visitor behavior in its algo. Heres my blog post.
I dont get the whole picture and also how we could benefit from this, but that does sound encouraging!
Yep, I did the same thing. You can find it here - The new Google Patent and the new quality guidelines . I guess I did overall analysis and didn't really bother do explain in details like you the meaning of User Behavior, but I guess its about time to do it .... Actually I don't agree with you that this data can be easily manipulated because I'm almost 100% sure that Google did thought about the possibility of SEOs trying to alter their rankings by abusing this criteria. In such terms I'd say that if you monitor only VISITORs then you might have some solid data, and it's really easy to get someone that is somehow related to you and is working/making you a favor by visiting the website and etc based on user behavior pattern matching. I red an article from one of the guys at Google that they were really digging deep on that topic, but he didn't mention anything on using it for ranking, but I guess that was kind'a expected ... Now my biggest worry is how to optimize my websites to decrease page bounce rates in order not to get penalized with ranking for irrelevant keywords .. which is not my fault really ... I'll have to bring this discussion on how to remove rankings for irrelevant keywords is there is such way .. I'm not sure ... Cheers, Venetsian P.S. My average time spent on page from Google Analytics is about 1.5 min to 2 min ....
Venetsian, Thanks for the info and I checked out the patent on your site. Both very interesting. One question though... Why do you feel that you have to optimize your site "in order not to get penalized with ranking for irrelevant keywords"? I would think that if your bounce rate is high for an "irrelevant" keyword then Google would just adjust your ranking for that keyword, not lower your entire site. The last thing you need to spend your time on is optimizing for keywords that are off topic.
I just finished writing the article on my homepage so you can check it out. I did write about that particular issue for ranking on irrelevant keywords might get your overall quality score down due to high bounce rates. Yes I do think that even if it penalizes that particular listing for that particular keyword it should not penalize the overall site rankings and quality score, but we have no proof for that. I assume that the Google Engineers are smart enough to link this rate only with particular keyword, key phrase or keyword theme rather than the whole thing. I'm currently experiencing this issue with my website SEO News Blog as we've started the weekly top paying adsense keywords and this ranked us for some quite irrelevant keywords and people come to our website looking for those keywords and generate massive amounts of Page Bounces. The overall bounce rate for that website is around 75% and I checked the inner pages where that particular keyword listings make about 95% bounce rates. That's so sad and I'll have to figure out something to get out of this situation. Now I'm really interested to see if we can find a way to use NEGATIVE KEYWORDS on our pages and underline which keyword we don't want to rank for and therefore minimize our bounce rates. I've discusses on my post here about the possibility of doing some cloaking in order to decrease those rates at least blinding the Analytics code. That will work 100% for the stumbler traffic but I have to figure out how to do that for irrelevant keywords search engine traffic as well and I might take to write new script for cloaking the Analytics code based on referring search engine keywords which is not very hard thing to do ... Cheers, Venetsian