I know all about SEO techniques and how it affects PR but im toying with the idea of PR also being greatly affected by how many people google/partner search, find and click on your site. ie. if a web user somehow finds my website via google (through a partners content site or via the google search etc) and clicks on it then do you reckon google records that click and uses it to rank my site higher in there index? The reason i ask is that i know of similar "schemes" where you can get high rankings, in for instance alexa, purely by having hundreds of people search and click on your site using alexa search. Your page doesnt need to be optimised, it could just me a blank page with a text box yet you can get top ranking. So based on this does anyone believe that you could effectively do the same in google by inflating the popularity of your site by getting hundreds of valid web users searching/finding/and clicking your website.
I suspect that Google does indeed take into account how often people click on a link to your site, including the one that appears when your site is shown in the SERPs. I can also believe that the number of links to your page makes a difference, although (since Jagger at least) the links have to be relative to your content and preferably from sites (e.g. in our case, real estate directories) that can be considered "authorities" (relatively speaking, of course). However, I've for some time questioned the value of reciprocal links that your visitors are unlikely to find of much use and, in my view, this includes agent sites in geographical locations well outside your immediately specific one. I also seriously doubt that a (possibly blank) page that dozens/hundred/thousands of sites link to is going to succeed. It may for a while, but it has to be simply a matter of time for Google to recognize the artificiality and attempt to manipulate the results. No, it's back to the drawing board with you! Duncan
I agree with your "geographical locations" statement. As for the blank page, that was using an alexa example (a page with only a textbox and search button had a ranking of 67,000). This was due only to artificially generated searches for that page. Drawing board, hopefully not
How many people click to your site has no effect on PR. Whether google uses that data for SERPS is an other thing, but PR doesn't work like that.
Whether or not it has an effect on PR is one thing but it makes sense that the amount of time people clicked on the listing would effect the SERP's over the long term.