User Behavior, Page Ranks and Google Traffic Patterns
Why do we want to rank high in Google search results pages?
Probably because we’re looking for ways to get more visitors coming to our site.
What do we assume more visitors will do when landing on our web site?
Well, perhaps buy more goods we offer, or more subscriptions to our services, or more comebacks and time spent reading our content or clicking some links. Ultimately you’re seeking for customer satisfaction, this being the key to promote your business and keep it developing. Well, same goes for Google. They need provide the best results on top. If your search gathers useless links of no interest, then you’ll start wondering and … wandering away to other search engines. So far though, Google is the uncontested winner on the search engine market, and likely to remain this way for years. Their secret: fluid algorithm changes, refining search results to closely emulate what people are looking for. Google is sort of budding AI, or Artificial Intelligence (not the evil Skynet-like from Arnie’s movie Terminator3, remember Google’s creedo: ‘do no evil’).
People in the white hat realm of search engine optimization are accustomed with the frequent algorithm changes by Google. That happens when the crawler bots get a largely modified set of instructions swingging the weight out of an element (like keywords focus, for instance) and onto a new one (such as title tags).
Algorithm updates got names, like hurricanes, more or less: the Florida update, the Jagger 1, 2, 3, to name the most common.
No doubt that in between these ‘named’ updates there are tinier ones, sort of fine tuning the algorithm. We should look at this algorithm process-to-perfection in a more *natural* perspective. It’s like a thing that ‘grows’ or feeds an unprecedented data base gathering all tidbits about anything bearing a tag of sorts — that is already huge enough to make the crawler bots *almost* intelligent…
Actually Google is now up to understand human behavior patterns. It’s like a remote machine would *know* what you’re having in mind, anticipating your next move. For a SEO business talk, the ‘Big Brother’ part of the story is less relevant. What we’re here interested in are the few new horizons Google is about to open for online marketing. Something like…
User Behavior and Traffic Patterns
Links were once the core of Google search, but times have changed. With Jabber updates, the links-only site farms were swept out of the top ranking pages lot. Content came in the leading position. Of course that links are still essential for making sense in the search engine management. But human nature (read tendency to trick organic results) altered links meaning. The robots were then instructed by a smarter algorithm to pay more attention towards content, depreciating links value. Now it’s time for a new algorithm update. Something that will separate ‘good’ content from ‘not so good’ or less ‘appreaciated’ content. Or at least this is where Google points with the traffic patterns idea.
Tracking user behavior will break or make your organic search positions starting next year, or earlier. Google will grow capable to differentiate between
- a) a content loaded site, regularly updated, where no human comes,
and
- b) a living web site, visited by many people who are returning and spending a measured time on every page — yes, Google is about to introduce in the algorithm even the page reading time spent by the user, along with the frequency of visits, returns, clicks and so on.
Search will become more personalized. Don’t start moaning and calling for the human rights activists. So far Google was proving not to bow at pressures for sharing private info with governments. In fact, this issue is less of concern for the end user and much more interesting for the SEO consulting firms, for web site owners and e-retailers. Tomorrow your site’s page rank will rise (or fall) according to yet another factor in the equation: the human person visiting and spending time on your web site. Is she feeling like a happy user? Google SERPs will tell!
What’s the message for SEO consulting?
Make a priority out of user behavior and site usability, make your site more attractive and never forget to make sure there are *always* (or close to) a couple of people clicking through your links and content.
For a closer look under the hood, read on the Google’s March 30, 2005 patent application, “Information retrieval based on historical data”.
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