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Comment by blacksmith_tb | Hacker News Reader

I am not sure how GOOG weighs what happens after you click on a result, it would be clever of them to notice how quickly you click on another result for the same search and slightly downgrade the first link (though, what happens if you open the first three links into new tabs before you actually visit them, say). My assumption was that they just counted clicks as an upvote, so if these scammers can make it into the first page of results, they will tend to stay.

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This is not even the first or second time Google has rolled out changes that allowed SEO spam sites copying Stackoverflow or Wikipedia to rank higher than the original.

They did fix this at one point in time by figuring out which site posted the content first and penalizing the copycats, but it appears the fix is once again broken.

I figure they must just be monitoring the original content and republishing it before it’s indexed by google. The searches are so specific and niche that generally ranking isn’t hard it’s beating the og that’s hard.

I just don’t know how they are managing to get indexed before the big name established sites. Perhaps they are succeeding on some small percentage and that is what we are seeing?

Perhaps they have an additional trick to make it look like they posted the content first, perhaps internal links or something.

I find that hard to believe, the SO questions are often years old, the GH ones months.

So how are they doing it ?

For a long time now, Google has weighted behavioral signals similar to what you describe. "Bounce Rate" is the percentage of users who quickly leave your site after clicking. "Dwell Time" is the amount of time a user spends on a page.

There's even a cottage industry around gaming these signals. See SerpClix and the like.

So how come pinterest is still on top with many searches?

Why not? Pinterest is a popular site, with lots of content all linked to each other. Many people probably spend a long time there after clicking a result.

The inordinate amount of time to click away all of the dark ui login screens just to see the content before making the decision its not what you wanted already increased the dwell time to longer than other sites.

So are you suggesting that GOOG is using bounce rate on the target site (assuming it uses gAnalytics I take it - otherwise how would they know?) to alter the ranking of search results (like "90% of users bounce in the first two seconds on scam.copycat.com/seemed-useful so we're demoting its rank by 20%"?) That would be interesting, I was musing more about if GOOG does any session tracking on their end to try and infer how happy/unhappy users are with a given set of results. Of course they could do both at the same time.

Stop using stock ticker names to refer to companies. It's cringe and not even easier to type.

I agree, but even more generally avoid abbreviations. A reader has to spend time thinking about what you are talking about. It’s detracting.

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