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Does Google Rank on Traffic Patterns?

An interesting thread over at WMW brings up the question of whether Google uses browsing patterns collected by the toolbar in the ranking algorithm.

There's an interesting range of opinions, from thought provoking to... tin foil hat provoking.

Many names seem to think it is the case -- Tabke for one -- though a few others disagree. If it is fact, the effect on SEO is fairly obvious, though I don't see many people considering that. On the black hat side, it also seems exploitable.

- Y! MyWeb

Noted it a while back

I first mentioned it on 1/13/2005 over at seo chat, and then updated it a year later on a seo scoop post. I called it a kooky theory, but I've since tracked it on other sites, and am at least fairly confident that it holds some merit. The details of it (exactly how) though still elude me.

By dazzlindonna at Apr 11 2006 - 20:04

Yes.

It's not a new thing.

By grnidone at Apr 11 2006 - 22:07

not happening

At the Webmasterworld Pubcon conference in November of last year, Matt Cutts literally said that no data from the Google Toolbar were used to influence the ranking. I've blogged about it: http://lvb.net/item/2026 , see quote 6.

By LVB at Apr 12 2006 - 00:09

personalized

Of course if you switch on the (experimental) "personalized search results" in Google (you have to be logged on for that), the ranking is influenced by your own clicking-on-search-results behaviour, but you knew that already.

By LVB at Apr 12 2006 - 00:11

I think it is silly to

I think it is silly to assume they don't track user acceptance somehow. Why WOULDN'T they do that?

Now obviously the algorithms are not traffic pattern only based (or Seth probably wouldn't be complaining about tea results)

Do a google search on Tea and you'll find 196 million matches. The first match is the Texas Education Agency.

I thought econman's post on page 2 sounds good

user behavior data could be extremely useful in helping Google identify and filter low quality sites (aka "spam) -- sites filled with computer-generated pseudo text, MFA's and networks of simulated sites that are created for SEO purposes.

So maybe a certain amount of trusted user feedback of some sort is needed in addition to link popularity before a site can rank for highly competitive queries.

By seobook at Apr 12 2006 - 05:41