Bye bye links, welcome user behaviour

Theory:

In the near feature, the most important thing on your website for your rankings will be user behavior. Links will be seriously devalued.

anyone agree?

 

I don't think so. The value of links might be reduced but not totally devalued. Links is important even in the real world (human socialization or communication!!!).. User Behaviour + Links = Good Search Rankings Factors.

 

Depends. That's how things are with tracking scripts and the like. For example the Alexa javascript that O have on my blog keeps track of usage. Another example I've noticed is that whenever someone searches for something on my blog, Google's search engine spider is duping the search about 15-20 later.

 

If everyone knew about all the sites, it would make sense to see where users go. But if you ignore links, search engines will only display old sites that get a lot of traffic. What about great new sites or sites that have grown and improved? Searchers want to see the latest and greatest too.

 

If search engines are smart, that will be the case. Thanks to their love affair with backlinks, it has led to ridiculous internet-wide spamming and an endless quest to get worthless manufactured backlinks to keep being competitive...

If websites were ranked on their actual worth (such as how visitors are interacting with it, and for how long & often) then you'll start seeing garbage wesbites die out on a grand scale.

 

Wow this would be a great solution, though without real tracking software installed on the users side, tracking behavior is nearly impossible.

Also, it's a fairly heated topic, pricacy.

 

I'm sure botters and owners of proxy farms wait gleefuly for that day... Not all user behavior metrics are indicative of site relevance to search terms. The only user behavior item I see being relevant is bounce rate.

 

It may be possible, but it seems like it will take time before that happen.

 

It's already happening. That is why the links in search results are coded. Most of the time they're not direct links. Google tracks how long you're on a page. If you click back after 2 seconds, they know that wasn't a good page to show you. If 500 people do the same thing, it's obvious that isn't a good result.

 

I don't think so that is future links have no value....

 

Totally disagree... Will never happen in my lifetime... Until Search Engines develop mind reading reading abilities, they will never be able to really use user behavior to rank pages. First of all once they click away from the site, the user is no longer trackable by the engine. They can't tell if they view 2 pages on my site or 22 pages... They don't know why a user clicked on a particular link... if were because they thought it was something they were looking for or because they thought it looked out of place and were just curious what the hell it linked to.

Yeah they can track bounce backs... that's about it. But even with bounce backs, Google has no clue if the user bounced back 10 seconds after clicking on a link 1) because they thought the site was NOT what they were looking for or 2) because they IMMEDIATELY found what they were looking for like a phone number or definition.

Unless you have Google Analytics installed on your site, Google knows very little. Do you think they only want to rank pages from sites using Analytics? That would be a terrible move akin to what led to the demise of IBM in the technology industry because they wanted to get companies "hooked" on their proprietary hardware and software so they had no competition. They got away with it in the early years of computing, but it backfired later with the coming of the open source movement. Are you going to install a different analytics package from every search engine you want to rank in? I doubt it...

Unfortunately the engines don't know how to read minds... so for the foreseeable future I would count on your rankings being based on HTML not user behavior.

 

But search engines store search engine logs data (9 months as for IP addresses and still more on an anonymous basis) in order to "improve search results" (google privacy statement)

BTW
In fact, they kept data for a longer period. But, they had to reduce storage duration of individual data to 9 months upon request on Privacy Authorities, incl the European Commission.

... or the user have the Google Bar installed on his computer. Then, Google knows everything with full details

(or if you have installed google Adsense in your site, Google knows also quite a lot about your visitors)

 

Or use Chrome I would think.

 

we will be seeing more if quality websites at the top then.

 

It is hard to decide on the user behavior, i still believed that link is the way

 

This is an interesting topic. I am not an SEO expert but from the looks of it, links could be seriously devalued in the future. Look at paid links. They used to be all the rage and then Google found a way to clamp down on people who accept paid links. What's next? Could they also find a way to crack down on people who create backlinks forum and comment posting?

 

not true - it's already happening. Don't think for a second that Google isn't using Google Analytics data for these purposes!

 

won't happen because there will just be sweat shops in third world countries with folks clicking your site from the search results all day. I can just see it now: $5 for 4000000 Search Engine Result Clicks

 

The only way this would be feasible is if everyone or close to everyone use this software for traffic tracking.

 

think about it this way. how do you think google generates ' site links ' those are the most popular pages that people go .

obviously the spider must monitor that beside just index your site.