Isn't one of the key ranking factors time users spend on the page? Wouldn't poorly written / empty worded articles cause users to bounce quickly thus causing them to rank poorly?
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-bounce-rate-signal-23671...
In the original PageRank? No.
These days, who knows? But Google only knows how long people stay on the page using Google Analytics and many sites (mine, for instance) don't use it.
I am a quick reader and are very good at quickly skimming articles. I hope Google doesn't rank pages based on time spent, since Google would be optimizing their search away from my preferences.
They know what time you clicked the link in the search results to go to page X. They also know when you hit the back button to come back to the search results.
My understanding was the faster you backed out meant the less-relevant the page was.
It was one of many factors in the ranking algorithm.
I think they also know if there are any ads hosted by google, or if the user is using chrome.
Depending on how moral they are, they could figure it out if the user is on android at all, or if the site has recaptcha, or if they're using google DNS, or if they have a partnership with the ISP, or if the site is loading fonts or javascript libraries from google servers, and probably some others that I can't think of off the top of my head.
Here's how I understood it to work:
If a user finds you on a Google search and then clicks the link, Google times how long it takes for you to come back to the search results. So if you immediately backed out of the page they would take that as meaning the result was crap and they took that into account in their algorithm. The thinking being that it was an irrelevant result.
However, that counts against sites that provide the answer you want right at the top of the page so that when you open the page, the answer is staring you in the face... so obviously you are going to back out again as you have your answer.
This was from around two years ago when I was researching building an indexer and search engine for kicks so my memory of how it worked is fuzzy.
Also, it may have changed.
That way I don't to wait for the pages to load, as they load while I'm launching the next etc.
Then I go through the tabs, closing the ones that are useless.
Not sure how Google would deal with this.
As long as they don't use lazy loading that is..
When users click the back button they bounce back through the redirect to the SERP.
You can test the tracking by right clicking and copy/pasting the URL of any Google search result. This can be stripped using add-ons (and I highly recommend it).
Probably not even Google at this point. There's enough ML in play now that they couldn't tell you definitively why the top pages are the top pages.
- "Clickstream" data from Chrome. Sorry I don't have the source in hand, but I remember that Rand Fishkin was talking about it some time ago.
- Statistical analysis on the SERP (eg. if you search for something, click a link, go back and pick another result, that is a bounce)
- This is just speculation, but I'd say their ad network can be a source too