The concept of ranking search engine results based on the amount of users visiting a site is not new. This is what DirectHit focused on when it launched in 1998. DirectHit ranked sites based on how many users clicked on your site in the serps and how long they stayed on it. Here are some good and bad points on using user data for ranking. Feel free to add to it.
Good Things
- Ranking popular sites higher makes senses
- The average webmaster can’t manipulate it
- Lots of data available from user accounts, toolbars, cookies etc.
Bad Things
- It can be manipulated by programmers
- It hampers new sites that are just gaining an audience
- Hard to distinguish the noise from the signal in the data
- It rewards sites driving large volumes of traffic with ppc
The reason why this is becoming a more popular topic to talk about is because speculation has been building for over two years that Google is using this data. Even if they aren’t using the data today it makes sense that they would like to use it in the future. How do you prepare yourself for this?
- Make sure you have good ppc knowledge. This is an easy way to increase the usage and if done correctly you will actually increase your profits with a well run ppc campaign.
- Build up more content and the “stickiness” of your site. In other words make your site bigger and you will have more reasons for people to visit you and stay on your site. Adding blogs, a photo gallery or daily jokes can help increase regular usage.
- Poor usability is your friend. Less than perfect usability will increase the amount of time people spend on your site and increase the page views. Of course if you have terrible usability the users will abandon your site faster than the Titanic.
- Make friends with a smart programmer (this always goes without saying
