will click through get you higher position?

A friend of mine insists that click throughs will get better ranking.

let say we have two competitors with the almost the same content and backlinks.
They compite for a search term.

The one that gets the most clicks will get a better ranking.

I think that's false, because it would be very easy to influence those results, but tell me if I am wrong and I should apologize to my friend.

 

it's an intresting point about the google but i can not say it's false . google is crazy search engine.

some people are saying that google looking for over 200 point to get the search result

 

Instead of ranking you should worry about "duplicate contents" penalty.: rolleyes:

 

AFAIK Google can and does track click through via the Google toolbar, along with time spent on page and whether a user bookmarks the page so I would suppose it does factor these in to it's ranking algorithm!

Bill

 

I think it does...

 

You'll notice that sometimes, the links in the results directly point to the target website, and sometimes the link points to the google domain, with a redirect to the target website.

They certainly do this for a reason. If this factor is not directly used in the algo, it is most certainly indirectly used.

 

No one knows.

I believe that the general consensus in the SEO community is that it is not likely that they do. However, the patent application document that surfaced a year or so ago included at least one claim about using clicks as a factor. But, just because it was included does *not* mean that they do now, or ever will, use that information.

/tom/

 

I have seen a page of mine rise to the top for a popular keyword (myspace related) slowly but surely - and I do think that has to do with click-through rates.

 

I know what you are thinking, but this is a merely an academic question. I don't have two sites with the same or similar content

The discussion came because I am trying to figure out why my rankings on google are slipping against other competitors.

 

agreed. everything is just specualation and good guessing when it comes to SE algorithims. even if it happens in ones case, doesn't mean it's true for all cases.

Everytime someone says "i believe this" or "i believe that" i go and back check what they say and sometimes they're right, sometimes they aren't. so when it comes to this stuff, i just do what makes sense and try not to overthink or over-analyze this stuff cause the answers are ususally right in front our faces the whole time but by nature have a hard time believing that some things can be just that simple

just my .02

 

I don't think it has to do with clickthrough either. Sites in the first places for keyword would receive more clicks everytime, so other sites would't stand a change by not being in first place and not receiving clicks.

 

that's the common sense i'm talking about

 

The short version answer is NO.

But when google makes a big change (an algorithm udate. i.e, florida update), they do place a statistical counter on the search results instead of a direct link. Even in that case the reason behind that is monitoring the quality of the SERPs, not ranking sites based on clicks.

 

My opinion is that more clicks from google search you have, the higher position in search engine you have. I notice that only on specified keywords for my website but it really works so just try to click 1000 times on your website in the results of search.. you will see the effect in a few moments keep it secret ;P

 

The general answer is no, G doesn't look at click activity to influence your rankings...but a few months ago a research paper was found that listed about 120 different factors that can be used to rank results such as the time spent on a website. If you do a search on G, click a link then come back to the same Google page a few seconds later, G knows you didn't find what you were looking for...

 

The higher your site is in the SERPs the better is position will be. Google does not track click throughs so they would not rank sites higher with better CTRs.

 

if google is tracking the click throughs and the duration of stay on a particular website, aren't they encoraching the user's privacy rights ?

How do they track the duration of stay, if the user do not have google tool bar installed ?

 

Yahoo tracks clicks, and MSN used to, Google does very, very occassionaly, and I havent seen them do it for a while.

 

interesting idea. it could be, we all know that we can see from our server web log, our visitors path (origin site/entry and destination site/).
you know, google search result page has script tag all over the page. do a search and see the page source at the page result. definitely not just simple html links in tables.

 

This is an old idea, but the problem with it is the likelihood of manipulation. The owner of a site could train thousands of robots or monkeys to repeatedly click on their site's entry in the SERPs.