20 replies to this topic

[wsajay]

I do apologize if the this has been asked a million times. I did search topic and not find much.

I assume that traffic is an important thing when search engines evaluate a site. Not sure what percentage of the "whole picture" it is but if is important, how does one get traffic to a site when its not a real popular site?

Can someone tell me if it is important, and how one gets the traffic if it is important.

[Randy]

I assume that traffic is an important thing when search engines evaluate a site.

And how would you propose the search engines find out how much traffic any given site is receiving since that's proprietary data to which they are not privy? About the best they could do is take a guess, and guesses are highly unreliable. Thus it's not part of the ranking algorithm.

Do you need traffic? Yes you do. But not for search engine rankings.

How to get traffic depends in large part on the site in question, what it offers, who its target market is, how well it is constructed, the quality of its content and how well it's being marketed. In other words, there is no simple one size fits all answer to such an open ended question.

[adibranch]

unless of course you install the most popular analytics service out there, and hit the share button.. then they may just get an idea of how much traffic your pages get.

[Jill]

But since they don't know about what your competitors who don't have that analytics service installed are doing, what good is that information?

They should punish or reward only those who use GoAn? Doesn't really make logical sense to me.

[adibranch]

depends on how you look at it i guess Jill. Lets say for example my page is listed in the top ten for a term which i've been actively campaigning for for some time. As far as google is aware this page is pretty relevant or it wouldnt be there. However, this page in truth is actually is a bit spammy, not really relevant and only really deserves to be there through the merits of a marketing scheme and some decent if somewhat misleading SEO.

In this case google may be failing in its purpose to provide quality sites which are relevant to that term and that the visitor will find useful. But how would it know this for sure? Pretty simple really.. its got all the info it needs.. namely the bounce rate and time on page from its analytics service which you have conveniently given it access to.
If the page in question has a very high bounce rate for the term that sent visitors to it, its obviously a problem, it isnt relevant, or some other issue. For google, this would be a fail in its purpose. Now then , if i wanted to keep my position as the no1 search engine for relevant and infomative results, would i ignore this info that has been permissively shared with me? I most certainly would not

of course, this is just a wild wacked out idea, not even a theory. Makes sense though.

Edited by adibranch, 13 September 2009 - 11:00 AM.

[Jill]

While I agree with the theory, until or unless Google had access to everyone's analytics, it seems that their goals wouldn't be served completely (or fairly) if they used that info that way.

That said, I wouldn't be surprised if they do use GoAn data in aggregate to determine patterns and things, but just not to punish (or help) any one particular page.

[Randy]

I understand your theory adibranch and agree that they certainly have access to tons of data, much more than anybody else considering all of the various services they offer and the success of those services. (Don't forget YouTube, where they actually have a lot more control over the content and hits to it, which also has been said to be the second largest "search engine", second only to Google proper.)

The issue however is whether or not Google has legal right to view and/or use the Google Analytics data in any way, shape or form. And a lot of this question depends upon your own settings choices in your site's Google account.

Larger entities like Google tend to not have one thing in their Terms and do completely the opposite, because when they have deep pockets they're almost sure to be sued in a big way if they do. There are plenty of lawyers out there quite willing to take on the class action suits against companies with very deep pockets, and such suits would surely result from the type of action you ascribe to them.

This type of data sharing is discussed in their FAQ, where it says in part:

Will sharing my data directly affect the ranking of my natural search results, ad quality score or ad placement?

Your website data will not be used to affect your natural search results, ad quality score or ad placement. Aggregate data across many customers will be used to improve our products and services.

Now I'm not a lawyer, however here's how my lawyer reads that... Even if I chose to share my GoAn data with Google they would not --not should not, but would not-- use it to affect my site's organic rankings, Adwords quality scores or placement in either. And that's if I choose to share data with them. Choosing not to share data with them becomes far more restrictive.

With such a clean, bold statement in their FAQ and Terms they'd be foolish to try to snatch the data and do exactly that with it secretly. Their own legal department wouldn't allow them to do it as a normal course of business, without first changing the FAQ and Terms. Forget the hit the Google brand would take. The legal liability would simply be too large.

[adibranch]

i'm no lawyer either randy, but the use of 'directly affect' in that question opens it up to loopholes to me.. and i'm sure google has more lawyers and practices in place than most of their analytics users put together , and have the necessary small print to get them out of anything.

still.. i also believe the moon landing was a con

[OldWelshGuy]

My personal view is that the more information and access you give Google to your site i.e. transparency, then the more trust they will give you. But other than that I can't see how they can run it.

[Randy]

Well that moon landing bit explains a lot now doesn't it adi?

Seriously though, I doubt the "directly affect" is in there by accident. Nor does my attorney. But I've always ascribed to OWG's point that the more you try to hide the harder it is to gain trust, whereas the more transparent you are the less difficult it is to gain trust. That goes for both the search engines and your visitors.

[adibranch]

i dunno really.. but i've often noticed in a few examples, how successful pages or products seem to self promote, not necessarily from other sites but purely in the organic listings. Sometimes jumps will be apparent and significant even with no work. I cant explain these jumps, but part of me wonders. Conversely, i can struggle and struggle with poor performing product pages and get nowhere.
I do realise of course that this isnt proof of anything any way whatsoever.

But, here's an interesting point.. has anyone managed to get sitelinks who isnt using analytics? or GoAn as it now seems to be called All my sitelinks are on sites using analytics, so i just wondered.

[Randy]

has anyone managed to get sitelinks who isnt using analytics?

Yup, sure have. Both seen 'em and managed to get 'em, with no GoAn in sight. Multiple times.

GoAn is simply not a requirement to get sitelinks in Google.

In fact I could even show you a SERP where both the #1 and #2 site has sitelinks. One of them uses GoAn and the other doesn't. Of course you'd probably still see a ghost in the corner since the site that utilizes GoAn happens to be sitting at #1 right now because the other one hasn't had any marketing done for the last several months. But don't worry, the rankings will flip around again before the next high season hits.

[adibranch]

i've seen the sitelinks 'snippets' that get used on the top 3 positions (official name?) , if thats what you mean? or do you mean two sets of the normal sitelinks for both position 1 and 2?

[Randy]

Dunno what the official name of those sitelinks is. I'm not even sure there is one. I've always considered them to be pretty much the same thing even though they look different, because typically if you have the inline or what you're calling "snippet" version you're generally going to have the other kind on a different, more specific phrase.

In other words, the two column kind seems to show up when you search for something like a brand or company name and there is one single site that is obviously THE authority for that more specific phrase. This two column version tends to have more sitelink links. The inline or what I believe you're snippet version of sitelinks seems to show up when there are multiple possible authorities on a subject. And those generally show up for multiple sites when searching for a more generic type of term.

In my experience if a site qualifies for the inline type with a more general phrase it pretty much always qualifies for the column type if you look via a brand or company name.

In neither case however is a GoAn account necessary to get the sitelinks.

[hankk]

The OP asked about Traffic, and GoAn is not the only way to measure that.

There are plenty of toolbars out there that report on traffic to each web page visited. With a little programmed "guesswork" the owners of the toolbars can figure out how long you spent on each page (unless you're like me and have several browsers and tabs open at the same time )

And how much info does Chrome report back?

I think it would be foolish of Google, Yahoo!, etc not to use this info when ranking sites. Page visits, and time spent on a page, are a very important measure of how interesting that page is to a human. The only issue is how much do the SEs use this data?