I've commented before on my blog about traffic helping with SERPs (not PageRank). I have seasonal sites, so it is fairly easy for me to watch each one's rise and fall. For those sites that rank well in Yahoo and MSN, but not in Google, the pattern gets clearer and clearer to me. When the season begins, I begin getting traffic from Yahoo and MSN rankings. As this traffic climbs, and reaches a certain point, BAM! Google rankings appear. Once the season is over, and the traffic declines, BAM! Google rankings disappear. And the cycle begins again the next season. Traffic may only be one factor in the rankings, so if everyone has consistent traffic, they may not notice any changes. But for sites like mine, that have significant peaks and valleys in traffic, it is easy to see.
Would these be direct traffic from the PR9 site or will influence the serps so much as to bring substantially more traffic as a result of the PR9 backlink?
traffic is a consequence not a factor in PR, and not in the toolbar PR but the internal PR. The one I call dynamic PR http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=56717
Interesting. If traffic is a factor in rankings (I've never seen any conclusive evidence that it is at this time) how would paid traffic fit into the mix? I worked on a site last year that went from 0 visitors in September to over a million visitors per month for the 4th quarter. Those millions of visitors had no impact on the organic rankings at all. Thoughts?
It's been known for so long, that Google counts clicks (the link don't appear as : www.domain.com , but with many parameters in the link) for the links that appear in search results. Not all the time, but i have seen this myself. So theoreticly they know how many users clicked to get to your website, and so on. This is the only not so transparent way, for them to know how much traffic a website has. The counting of clicks, adsense, analytics and the toolbar are just some of the ways they might know the traffic.
Google's main aim to is show most relevant results first. If a site abc.com is getting 100 times more traffic than xyz.com , it doesnt mean abc.com should be more relevant to user queries. However if in search results for a particular query, people repeatedly give preference to xyz.com over abc.com and visit xyz.com , it can be concluded that xyz.com is more relevant to abc.com for that particular query. My opinion is traffic coming from Google ( and not total traffic) may affect SERPs for certain keywords. From Google's Patent Application
Here is the proof that theres no major relationship between PR and Traffic... I've got a site thats been PR6 for over 6 months & it gets less than 100 uniques/day. But boy, do i get hammered by the bots.