Do Clickthroughs in Google Search Results Help Rankings?
A friend of mine asked an interesting question the other day…
Have you ever come across any information stating that Google may increase a certain listing if it all of the sudden starts to receive a lot of clicks? I’m working on a search reputation management thing for a client. He had a negative result from an old article ranking on the second page, and since we have been working on it over the past few weeks the result has slowly increased to the number 2 position. Could this be because we have been clicking on the link a lot? Thanks a ton!
The famous Google March 2005 patent talks about measuring clickthroughs in organic. I have never seen anyone prove that Google is actually doing this, but seems they’d be crazy not to take it into account at some level. Instead of trudging through the patent application itself, I recommend reading this SEOMOZ article that breaks down each component and explains it well. Researching and understanding the patent stuff back in 2005 really helped me see the direction that Google was going in and probably helped me avoid making some mistakes that could have hurt me in the long term.
So, I’d say yes it is possible, but I doubt anyone will ever be able to game Google by clicking their own results. The more I think about it, the more it makes sense that an old dead result could come to life if it suddenly got clicks vs. a top result for a competitive keyword. But, then again, who knows, it’s just a patent application. It would be very interesting to try and test this. Find a bunch of old articles from the same site that appear in search results. Use one set as a control and give the others a sudden bunch of clickthroughs from many different IP addresses. See if it has any effect.
March 18th, 2008 at 6:49 am
Emory,
It makes sense to me that it would be factor. After all, if the search engines are “in the business” of providing a service – how else would they be able to measure customer satisfaction and then, give their “customer” more of what is (apparently) wanted?
Pat
March 19th, 2008 at 5:24 am
Hi this seems to be an interesting experiment. Please let me know the result after it’s completed or f you need my help for this experiment then please let me know!!
Thanks.
March 20th, 2008 at 10:51 am
If that were true, i would come first on the seocontest2008 and for many competitive terms which i am targeting! :-)
Wishful Thinking!
Certainly NOT true for any of the competitive terms that i am targeting!
April 21st, 2008 at 6:14 pm
I think that clickthrough in organic results also have effects on google rankings, if not, how could google tell if their results are relevant or not?