I originally made this post back in May/June 2011 after seeing how important I thought having a Google Profile would become and after thinking Google must use traffic data more.
Here we are nearly 12 months later, Google say they are changing the way back-links are being used and SEO’s are paniking.
Was my prediction that the traffic data Google obtain via the SERP’s correct? Who knows, but as Google appear to be using more and more social features I still think it could have a bearing and would be interested to hear what others think.
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As more and more SEO’s are manipulating the Google results by buying links, using link building schemes, link dropping, etc. some people are saying surely it is only a matter of time before Google tweaks the algorithms to give less emphasis on back-links.
Some of us who have been doing SEO for a number of years suspect that this is already happening.
A seemingly obvious way for Google to know which websites are popular and trusted is not how many links a site has pointing to it, but how much traffic pages on the site receive via Google.
For instance, if I put a brand new page online. would it not make more sense for Google to think it is a good page if it receives 1,000 different visitors via Google rather than think it is a good page because it has 100 links pointing to it?
If this is the case (as I suspect it is) it makes link baiting a whole new ball game, rather than using link baiting to attract people to link to our pages, maybe we should be doing Traffic Baiting and attracting more traffic to our pages?
This may sound a bit like a chicken and egg scenario,
ie.
Do good pages produce more traffic
or
Does more traffic produce good pages (in googles eyes)
Traffic Baiting Techniques – What is Traffic Baiting
There are a number of traffic baiting techniques that can produce high volumes of traffic via Google without necessarily having really well optimised pages.
The most popular way of traffic baiting is using news stories and current affairs and being creative with your page titles.
A short blog post made at the right time, with the right post title can easily bring in hundreds, if not thousands of visitors to a page and the more you do this the easier it becomes as it appears the site gains strength as it receives more traffic.
Further information about Traffic Baiting coming soon
To carry on with this post let’s look at one of my little SEO theories Traffic Rating
I uspect that Google is using a form of traffic rating for new pages to balance out the effect of the Google Panda update.
This provides some interesting prospects. If Google do adopt this there is still massive scope for abuse as traffic can be bought quite easily. Actaully it may be easier than doing links although there may well be a footprint to alert Google.
I wonder if traffic via links might be the best true vote for a site?
I’m not talking about traffic in general, only the traffic that Google sends via the results after doing a Google search.
For a number of years Google has used a system that SEOs often refer to as Fresh Bot.
What the Google Fresh Bot does is artificially highly rank new pages for a day or two before they then drop back to their natural position.
I’ve often wondered what the point of Freshbot was but if you follow my theory you will see it makes perfect sense.
My theory is that Google uses the freshbot to give a page an initial boost, if that page then generates no visitors via a Google search they assume it is of low importance and it then just drops back down to it’s natural position.
If the new page does receive *natural traffic, Google assumes it is of higher importance and marks it up.
The key point here is natural traffic, as you say traffic can be easily abused, but surely Google have more chance of monitoring the traffic they send via their results pages than monitoring any other way of manipulating results?
To sum up;
A new page is artificially ranked high, receives very few natural click throughs from Google is marked down.
A new page is artificially ranked high, receives very high natural click throughs from Google is marked up.
*natural traffic = unique IP’s, natural link patern, from county the page is related to, from people signed in to google, etc.
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