Lets say you are ranked on page 3 of Googl3, but for what ever reason you are the one everyone is looking for and you get more hits than guys on page one. Does traffic play any part in your ranking - will I then get promoted to a higher page?
I have noticed that on Google Picture Search but not on Google Standard Search. That's probably because on Google Picture Search there's a redirection from Google and then they can easily count the pictures most clicked
Like ajsa52, I have not seen a direct causation relationship on regular searches. Does not mean it isn't there...though. It is just really hard to isolate it to PROVE causation. Eric
Don't be fooled by PR. I have a 5yr old PR3 that gets about 10 unique hits or less a day. I also have a PR2 that gets about 500 uniques a day.
Traffic has no relevancy to actual search results. What does this answer have to do with the OP question? Oh wait, nothing.
I disagree, I have several sites with thousands on unique visitors per day, and most of their traffic are from search results on search engines or even on toolbars.
.....probably means that it is hard to knock off the top spot a guy who has higher PR and older domain than your site on page 3 that is getting more hits.
Did you even read the OP? Hes asking if traffic is a factor in search results, which it is not. Read the entire thread, understand it and the people you are quoting back. I see you do this all the time in other threads, are you just trying to boost you post count or something?
No, hes refering to how his lower PR website gets more traffic than the higher one, which really has nothing to do with the OP.
Please elaborate how your Pagerank post had any relevancy to the OP, I'm dying to hear the answer to this one.
Sorry, but I still disagree. How can you assure that traffic is NOT a factor in search results ? I guess that traffic is a factor (maybe little) on some search engines like Google. For example many people has the Google Toolbar installed on their browser sending info to Google. Do you think that Google does not use that info on their algorithm ?
Google can (and might) use javascript to detect a link click, temporarily stop the link click, use ajax to send the url of information about the google search page and the url being clicked, and the continue the link click action and send the user to their intended destination. This would be totally transparent to the user, with links appearing normally in the source. Also the if users, have javascript disabled or a different version of JS, the javascript for detecting the link click would just not run and the page would behave as normal. Not that I have any evidence the Google or any of Search Engine doing this but, I thought it was something they could or might be doing. I hope I didn't confuse anyone with my inadequate explanation of this. I learned how to do this from the book: http://www.sitepoint.com/books/dhtml1/
In theory, yes what your suggesting is possible, but think about how easy it would be to abuse that factor. This debate has gone on for awhile about traffic effecting search results; never has any Google employee's confirmed or denied this. The toolbar wouldn't matter if they were tracking traffic via search results since it's there backend, you wouldn't need the toolbar data. What your suggesting is they use toolbar data to gather information about sites people visit and use that factor in the ranking, how would you algorithmically add value to search phrase with that method that would be accurate and relevant.
Google has been working on this area at least from 2003. Even made a US Patent Application: "Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data". Here you can read an interesting article: Google's Patent - Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data In that article you can find some points related to this discussion: - Traffic Characteristics - User Behavior
This data is used for adwords and other aspects of Google technogoly; in #37 Google stated its actual use. This is assuming they still follow the original patent and have altered anything. +REP to agree to disagree in a respectable manner.