Google organic clicks affecting rankings

Posted on Oct 10, 2010 by Paul White

If you ask google how do I get the top ranking for my website, they will tell you its all about quality content.  But the problem is a search engine spider can't measure the difference between quality content and crap.  So this brings into question is google slowly starting to tweak their algorithm weighting it more on organic reaction to your website?

The reason I bring this is up is because over the last year I have seen a dramatic change to some of my website's traffic patterns.  Some of my sites used to get 1200 referrals from google.com each weak. These same sites are now down to less than 400 per weak.  Why the dramatic change?  I have a few theories as to why this has happened.

Change in Internal Keyword density

Even though these sites have stayed pretty consistent with the keywords they focus on, the home pages are dynamic and therefore the featured content does tend to change just a little each weak.  But overall the entire website has the same keyword density, so I don't think this could be the reason

Loss of Back Links

Its no secret that your search engine ranking is directly tied to back links from external websites.  If some of these sites no longer link to you, or have changed their policies to include a rel="nofollow" attribute on their links this would have a negative impact.  Also remember links from other sites are only valuable if the sites are in good standing with google.  IE if their page rank has dropped, the value of their backlink will not be worth as much for you either.

Google Organic clicks impacting ranking

Google tracks what people click on when searching for specific entries.  Naturally it makes sense that google would want to know which items get clicked and which items do not.  In a way its important to consider a click on a google search engine to be a vote for a given site.  This is why google says to focus on quality content.  Because if a user clicks on your link in google, and then hits the back button and clicks on something else this could potentially  hurt your search engine ranking.  I suspect that google has been adjusting its ranking Algorithm weighting it more heavily for user click patterns.  This has helped sites like my blog, yet hurt some of my client's websites. Especially the Adult ones. 

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