Do CTR manipulation services actually work to improve rankings?
-
I've seen a variety of services on the fringe of the SEO world that send a flow of (fake) traffic to your website via Google, to drive up your SERP CTR and site engagement. Seems gray hat, but I'm curious as to whether it actually works.
The latest data I've seen from trustworthy sources (example and example 2) seems mixed on whether CTR has a direct impact on search rankings. Google claims it doesn't. I think it's possible it directly impacts rankings, or its possible Google is using some other metric to reward high engagement pages and CTR correlates with that.
Any insight on whether CTR manipulation services actually work?
-
No problem, hope it helps!
-
I can't figure out if they are really that ignorant of the rules or if they are just lying.
Probably both! And, they say anything that makes the best story to gain a client, hold a client or make themselves look innocent when things go wrong.
-
Also Googlers a) have to fight pretty much only with algorithms and b) have to minimize collateral damage. That gives black hatters an advantage, and makes it impossible for Google to completely win. What annoys me is the fact that almost every single SEO company claims to be 100% white hat and Google-approved, while many are buying links, doing link networks, etc. I can't figure out if they are really that ignorant of the rules or if they are just lying.
-
**We have competitors who are using very shady SEO tactics and winning with them. **
I think that it is more Google being slow to identify problems and conservative about what they penalize. When SEOs go into the manuipulative zone they are taking their chances that Google will not find them or penalize them. SEOs who do this often do not fully inform the client that risks are being taken and that they could be slapped with a penalty that will permanently ban them from google, or in the case of Penguin, have their site demoted in the SERPs for nearly two years.
-
Good info, thanks!
-
I've definitely heard of this working with people using crowd-sourcing websites (such as Crowdflower) to pay next to nothing for thousands of people to Google a keyword and click on a specified listing.
Whilst the effects of CTR manipulation are pretty instant and it definitely works, it's often short lived and Google is quick to pick this up as an anomaly, rather than data of statistical significance.
In short, it works and it works pretty quickly but if you can't sustain the CTR metrics, you're going to fall back down the rankings.
-
I think you over-estimate how smart Googlers are and how dumb shady SEOs are. I've seen blatant tricks that have been working for years. I don't use such tricks because they are very risky, but I don't think we should dismiss them as useless - I think it's worth understanding which work and which don't, especially if our competitors are using them. We have competitors who are using very shady SEO tactics and winning with them. Understanding what they are doing and what is working helps us determine which white hat tactics to deploy against them. That's why I'm asking for data on CTR manipulation.
-
Google is really smart about manipulation. They have teams of PhD engineers looking out for it and racks of servers watching for it. These guys are so into it that they don't go home at night. And, the guys who offer these clicking services are not very smart. If they were smart they would be making big bucks in cushy jobs like Google Engineer and riding hoverboards around their offices. The intersection between really smart people and really dumb people isn't a good place to get involved.
-
Yeh, I think this is a good topic to be aware of, even if we wouldn't use it. That way we can respond correctly if our competitors use it, figure out white-hat ways to combat it, have a better understanding of Google's algorithms, etc. All else failing, it wouldn't be expensive to test them out.
-
I generally agree with you that Google is getting better at detecting tricks, but Google is far from perfect and there are a lot of tricks that still work. I'm looking for specific results/data specifically on the CTR manipulation services...
Have you done any tests with CTR manipulation services work?
This is not a tactic white hat SEOs would use, but it's still good for us to know whether it works, so we can respond correctly if our competitors use it, to figure out white hat ways to combat it, to answer client questions, to have a better understanding of Google's algorithms, etc.
-
Generally speaking, these types of schemes don't work, as Google is quite aware of people trying to do this. With the latest Google algorithm updates in the past few years, we've seen it become tougher and tougher for black hat SEO or gray hat SEO to be successful by trying to manipulate clicks, etc. and faking traffic.
We are aware of other techniques that have been manipulating Google suggest, though, and while that doesn't specifically influence rankings, it can lead to people searching for keywords that they wouldn't normally search for.
-
Hi there
No idea if it works or doesn't, but I'd be interested in hearing about it from a curiosity standpoint. My thought is if someone has thought to make a service / try it, Google is five steps ahead in preventing it from working in their algorithm. But yeah, would love to hear thoughts if someone has used it as well!
Thanks for starting what could be a really interesting discussion dude!
P
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
-
Improving Crawl Efficieny
Hi I'm reading about crawl efficiency & have looked in WMT at the current crawl rate - letting Google optimise this as recommended. What it's set to is 0.5 requests every 2 seconds, which is 15 URLs every minute. To me this doesn't sound very good, especially for a site with over 20,000 pages at least? I'm reading about improving this but if anyone has advice that would be great
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Wrong Pages Ranking
Good Afternoon We had an issue a while ago with the incorrect pages ranking in Google for some of our key terms. For example the page ranking for the term in Hotels in Spain was an individual information page for one particular hotel in Spain rather than the top level page which is optimised for "Hotels in Spain" The individual property page was ranking around 36-40 so we tightened up all the internal linking structure to ensure the term "Hotels in Spain" was pointing to the correct page and de-optimised the individual property page for the term. After a few weeks, everything seemed to be working and we were ranking top of second page for correct page however, ranking report today has reversed our good fortune and the incorrect page is ranking in a low position Any further suggestions or advise would be very much appreciated. Ideally, I don't want to remove the page that is ranking as it's still relevant for a search for that particular hotel
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ham19790 -
Is it posible to improve site rankings working only with an other site?
Hi everyone, i´ll try to explain a situation is happening to me, i´m goint to try to explain the case (im writing the sites without links for explication purposes. Site 1: Adventurerooms Site 2: Adventureroomsmallorca Site 3: Adventureroomsmadrid (the new site) What happen is that at first there was only Adventurerooms and Adventureroomsmallorca, Adventurerooms was for Madrid and linked to the one in Mallorca too, was kind of giving the information for Madrid but in first page split with a link to Mallorca. In a new strategy we create Adventureroomsmadrid for Madrid, and leave Adventurerooms for Spain (with links to Adventureroomsmadrid and Adventureroomsmallorca. We redirect the info for Madrid in Adventurerooms to Adventureroomsmadrid with 301 redirections. We work during this 3 months in Adventureroomsmadrid making content in the blog, and improving (now Adventureroomsmadrid is Moz 15 (perhaps even more), and Adventurerooms is Moz 10. Surprising Adventurerooms is getting better in its search rankings, even when we took away content from it and even without working well. Adventureroomsmadrid is also improving but not as much as Adventurerooms (i know that is a new site, only 3 months), but Adventurerooms gets better results with no content and only DA of 10. I hope i´ve explain the case with my english so the question is: "Is it posible to improve site rankings working only with an other site?" Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webtematica0 -
How to reverse declining Google rankings?
We have a long established business since 2004 and have been fortunate that having been one of the original companies in our industry, we have always enjoyed strong Google rankings. Unfortunately, these have been steadily declining over the past couple of years and a comparison of August to date against the equivalent period last year has seen a 20% drop in traffic from Google. We don't believe that it is being caused by a penalty and rather is the result of some strong players entering our market and tightening their focus which has caused us to take a dip in rankings. We are guilty of being complacent in our SEO - largely due to not knowing what to do and being scared to touch it when it was working in case we broke it! - but now it's time to fight back. We still have a strong site, good traffic levels and a strong product offering. We have knowledge of SEO and resources in house, but are not experts by any means. Our current plan is to: perform a technical site audit, fixing the issues highlighted by the Moz Pro Software put strong emphasis on our blog, writing daily about the latest news and events in our industry provide weekly content articles which are more in depth than the daily blog articles and which will be of interest to our community undertake surveys and publish infographics and statistics with the hope of being picked up in national newspapers Are there any key elements that we are missing out in this plan, or is that it in a nutshell? Any help and advice is greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simonukss0 -
Ranking Above sub-domains
So I work for a company that has a very successful affiliate that operates under a third level domain name such as "region.company.com". Their SEO practices are very good and they rank highly in keyword searches. However "company.com" does not even though it is not a subdomain. Even after optimizing the company.com's pages etc, the regional sub domain ranks much higher for keywords and the main company fails to rank at all. Is Google discounting the main company's page? Is it a matter of trust or time? or is it something else? How can I get Google to prioritize the main company website rather than a lower level domain affiliate?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Resolute0 -
How do I Improve Google Local search position
Hi, I think its called local search position, what I'm referring to is when you do a search on a keyword and google lists not only the best matches but also usually the second match is a group of 3 businesses with telephone numbers, google reviews and at the bottom of the group it will say something like: "See results for <your keyword="">on a map. This is what I'm referring to. in anycase my question is if I click on the link to see more results on a map I'm listed as number 3, however on the search page before where the link is displayed which I just clicked on I'm not being listed and instead one business name is being listed three times, each of the listings uses the same address but a different telephone number, In addtion the business that is being listed three times is also listed in the results being returned above in this case position #1 for the keyword I have searched. I assume this has something to do with them also being listed in the group of local businesses below three time.. The business I'm interested in getting listed in this group of results is currently being listed page 2 position 5 for the keyword..</your> Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.. Thanks in advance..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robdob11 -
Yoast Wordpress not working
Hey everyone, In looking through my site and doing some Google searches of titles we've written, it appears that all the posts we're making aren't showing up in Google search results. Example: If i paste the title of this post Netflix CEO suggests partnership with HBO, but HBO quickly nixes the idea into Google, it does not pull our post. Given the uniqueness of the headline, it should pull up our website in SERPS, but it doesn't. My assumption is that this Yoast plugin simply isn't working, but I doubt it's Yoast's fault. The site is not set to private, so that's not the problem. I'm also noticing that my sites description isn't showing up either. Can anyone help me solve this problem, please?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ttb0 -
Is there something wrong with my rank?
So I have blog with 5 posts. I don't know why but 1 of my posts rank higher than my main page...and it's not even trying to rank for the keyword. I'm not saying it's a bad thing because the post has some amazon on it but my main site is supposed to rank higher. Something wrong?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 6786486312640