What effect does previous page visits have in SERP?
-
We've all seen it before, right before a result, you see "You visited this page on ____"
What effect does a single visit have? Multiple visits?
-
Really interesting question about user engagement metrics that we don't have a clear answer to, but we've received hints from the engines that they track this sort of thing through toolbars, logged in searches and other methods.
Bill Slawski recently wrote a post on a Google patent that would adjust rankings on exactly this type of behavior. Quoting directly from the his article, the patent described user signals such as:
- The percentage of searches in which the user selected the first result (or one of the top results) in the list of search results
- The average first click position (i.e., the numerical position within the list of results)
- The percentage of searches that had long clicks (i.e., the percentage of times that a user selects a link to go to a result page and stays on that page for a long time, such as more than 3 minutes)
- The percentage of searches that did not have another search within a short period of time
- The percentage of searches that did not have a reformulated search (i.e., a search where one or more search terms in the original search are added, deleted, or changed) within a short period of time
- A combination of different metrics, and/or the like
So a single click, in the ocean of web results, probably will never make a large difference. Or even multiple visits by a single user.
But if you have a large number of users click on a result, and then click the back button to choose another search result - this is almost definitely going to have impact on rankings. Or, another example, if a large number of searchers consistently choose the URL in the 3rd position of a given SERP - and staying on that site - that particular domain might have a good chance of rising.
This past April, Google announced "we are beginning to incorporate data about the sites that users block into our algorithms." Again, a single person blocking a site from their search results probably isn't going to have an impact, but a large number of such actions probably will.
Engagement metrics are becoming increasing important, but all indications are they must be taken in aggregate.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Do the back-links go wasted when anchor text or context content doesn't match with page content?
Hi Community, I have seen number of back-links where the content in that link is not matching with page content. Like page A linking to page B, but content is not really relevant beside brand name. Like page with "vertigo tiles" linked to page about "vertigo paints" where "vertigo" is brand name. Will these kind of back-links completely get wasted? I have also found some broken links which I'm planning to redirect to existing pages just to reclaim the back-links even though the content relevancy is not much beside brand name. Are these back-links are beneficial or not? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Ranking gone for the original page and a shortened url ranks instead.
Hi Experts!!! Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year In Advance. I am been facing a issue with a few of my SERP results for "Singapore Visa" and related keyword. Until last to last Saturday i.e 16th December, I ranked for Singapore visa keyword with this url https://in.musafir.com/Visa/singapore-visa.aspx !!! But since 18th December I am ranking for "Singapore Visa" keyword with this url and message below it in place of description. Singapore visa - Musafir.com
Algorithm Updates | | sainath
go.musafir.com/Singapore-visa
No information is available for this page.
Learn why The go.musafir.com/Singapore-visa redirects to https://in.musafir.com/Visa/singapore-visa.aspx with some UTM parameters. The URL go.musafir.com/Singapore-visa is a shortened URL which was used for SMS marketing and all of a sudden Google has picked it in SERP instead of Singapore VIsa Landing Page. The Singapore visa Main page is not blocked by Robots.txt file. Please help me to resolve this.1 -
Content strategy for landing pages: Topics vs Features
Hi all, We are going to create new landing pages and optimise existing pages. We have a confusion on how to employ content on these pages....whether these will be filled with content to rank for "topics" and "keywords" or direclty jump into the features are are providing. If we go with first, users may feel boring about teaching them about that topic, if we go with latter...it's hard to rank being no related content to rank for that topic. I have seen some of the websites are employing multiple landing pages where they fill with topic related content and then link to features pages. I need suggestions here. Thank you
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz1 -
Puzzled by recent SERP results - what ranking factors cause this?
Hi mozzers, I have been using moz tools for a long while now for assessing SEO metrics with great success, but since recent Google algorithm updates I am seeing more and more SERPS that just simply don't make sense to me what so ever. The most startling recently was an assessment of one of the keywords my own site competes for "Link Building Services" The current No 1 position in Google.co.uk is held by http://www.napalit.org/ I invite all you seo experts out there to take a look at this site, look at it metrics in OSE compared with the "lower" competition and explain to me why it is No1. I would really like to know what ranking factors this site has that makes it "higher quality" and offer "better value" than the competition. I thought I understood what Google was trying to do with recent updates - get rid of non-value adding spammers and improve the quality of the search results. But now I am becoming more sceptical. Are they just making it impossible for us to make a difference by following good SEO practices so we all resort to paying for Adwords? I hope you guys out there can help me with this one and restore my faith. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | websearchseo0 -
How much does Google take Social into account in serps
I have been reading and trying to learn more about how google takes social media into account when ranking sites, but I cant seam to find a definitive answer to this, does it make a big difference or does it not really matter?
Algorithm Updates | | MiracleCreative0 -
Stop google indexing CDN pages
Just when I thought I'd seen it all, google hits me with another nasty surprise! I have a CDN to deliver images, js and css to visitors around the world. I have no links to static HTML pages on the site, as far as I can tell, but someone else may have - perhaps a scraper site? Google has decided the static pages they were able to access through the CDN have more value than my real pages, and they seem to be slowly replacing my pages in the index with the static pages. Anyone got an idea on how to stop that? Obviously, I have no access to the static area, because it is in the CDN, so there is no way I know of that I can have a robots file there. It could be that I have to trash the CDN and change it to only allow the image directory, and maybe set up a separate CDN subdomain for content that only contains the JS and CSS? Have you seen this problem and beat it? (Of course the next thing is Roger might look at google results and start crawling them too, LOL) P.S. The reason I am not asking this question in the google forums is that others have asked this question many times and nobody at google has bothered to answer, over the past 5 months, and nobody who did try, gave an answer that was remotely useful. So I'm not really hopeful of anyone here having a solution either, but I expect this is my best bet because you guys are always willing to try.
Algorithm Updates | | loopyal0 -
Shortened Title in Google Places/Local Results in SERPs
I've been doing some local SEO lately and noticed something today. When I do a search for "State/town name Cat Toys", I see the title tag of the website in the local results as opposed to the business name. I'm happy they are showing up above the normal results, but I wonder if having the brand name at the end of the site title impacts clicks. For example: Site name: New Hampshire Cat Toys and Accessories | Cats R Us But in the places results the title is cut short because they show the address, so all they see is: New Hampshire Cat Toys and.... Do you think branding is especially important in local results? Or less important? I could hear arguments for both sides. I realize the site URL is shown in green below the title, but it's not the same as having a brand in the title portion. It also looks like some of the competition has just their name show up as opposed to their website title. Is this something I can fix in Google Places, or is something Google does on its own? Cheers, Vinnie
Algorithm Updates | | vforvinnie1 -
Difference in which pages Google is ranking?
Over the past two weeks I've noticed that Google has decided to change which pages on our site rank for specific keywords. The thing is, this is for keywords that the homepage was already ranking for. Due to our workload, we've made no changes to the site, and I'm not tracking any additional backlinks. Certainly there are no new deep links to these pages. In SEOmoz dashboard (and via tools/manual checking with a proxy) of the 24 terms we have first page ranking for, 9 of them are marked "new to top 50". These are terms we were already ranking for. Google just appears to have switched out the homepage for other pages. I've noticed this across a couple of client sites, too, though none to the extent that I'm seeing on our own. Certainly this isn't a bad thing, as the deeper pages ranking means that they're landing on the content they want first, and I can work to up the conversion rates. It's just caught me by surprise. Anyone else noticing similar changes?
Algorithm Updates | | BedeFahey1