How Google Uses Click Data for Ranking

Hello and welcome to SEO is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years.

Hello, welcome to SEO is not that hard. It's me, ed here, as usual, and today I'm going to talk about how Google uses click data for ranking. Now, this is kind of quite a hot topic at the moment because of all the detail in the Google API leak of the past few weeks around how Google uses click data and click stream data. Now, this is particularly I'm going to talk about, particularly how they use click data from the Google search results, and this is based on a Google patent called Modifying Search Result Ranking Based on Implicit User Feedback. Now, this is quite an old patent. It goes back to 2006 and it's had many applications over the years. It was very current one. Now, essentially, what this does is it looks at um, describes how they can look at data from how people interact with search results to decide whether search result is a good search result or a bad search result, whether it should be boosted or lowered due to how people interact with it. And what they look at is the ratio of how many people click any given search result and whether they bounce back, so whether they come back to the search results and click another one. Now they do it in a way that gets around. Obviously, the big problem you would see, looking at this is well, everybody clicks results 1, 2, 3. We know that results 1, 2, 3 get loads of traffic and it slowly diminishes the further down you go. Now what they do is they modify for this by, instead of just looking at the total number of clicks and saying which one gets the most clicks that must be the best they actually look at a ratio of long clicks to total clicks.

Now, a long click is where Google measures the time between you clicking a result and coming back to it. So, for example, if you go to the search results and click position one, you look at it for two or three seconds, don't like it, come back, then go to position two and read that one for 30 seconds, then Google's going to say, ah, you've spent, spent, you know, 10 times as long on the page. It must therefore be a much more relevant result. So we're going to class that click as a long click. So what you need to do is essentially rack up good long views for your pages compared to the number of visits you get for it. So say, you get, over a given time period, 50 visits. You want as many of those 50 visits to be counted as long clicks, so people spending good time reading your content rather than people you know coming bouncing back and being counted as a short click. So if so, then even if the number one result is getting 20 times as many views as yours, if their ratio of long clicks is lower say, only half of their people get counted as long clicks on those clicks as long views then you get three quarters of your views deemed as long clicks. Then google's going to start increasing your relevance as compared to the number one result. So this is all about Google monitoring, yeah, how you react with results and really, through the patent you know, they seem to book it clicks into three. So that's, you know, short, medium and long clicks.

Now there's no exact number necessarily for what is a short and a long click, because they talk a great deal about how all these metrics are query specific. So certain queries and, by the very nature of them, which might be ones like you know what what year was george washington born, for example people are going to click that, go to an article, find it very quickly and come back. So what can be a long click for a query like that could actually be quite a short time period, whereas if you're asking something much more complicated like how does Pythagoras' theorem work, where, if you're going to want to learn how that works, you're going to spend a lot more than two seconds on a page. So long clicks for that kind of query are going to become much longer relative to others. So they can obviously work this out for every query. So for every query that they do, they can start to watch and generate these metrics and then compare pages and how they're Users react to them. And they say in the patent themselves that, you know, the very best marker of relevance Is how real you searchers interact with the results pages that they're given, the results that they go and look at. So that's why they're using this click data to sort of wait Results in the search engines. Now I will share a link to this in the search engines. Now I will share a link to this patent in the show note.

But there's lots of interesting information in there. So one bit is they talk about the information that could be gathered, for each click could include the query, the document result that the user clicked on, the time on the document, the interface language so what language the document's in the country of the user, and additional aspects of the user in session. So you can see how they can basically say well, if you're in a particular country, a particular language, and this document has a better timing, you know better time spent on it than the documents in other languages, in other countries. So they can then specify it down to that kind of geographical and language level as well when deciding on how to use these weightings. They also talk about how they can distinguish between informational and navigational intent for results and how they can sort of discriminate between them. Essentially, so for some queries which might have an element of informational and navigational intent, they can essentially say, right, well, we want to have a mix of informational and navigational results in the set. But we know that navigational results might have very quick response times compared to informational ones, so they can actually weight the document intent type when they're looking at this, this data. So this will prevent just purely informational, really dense results overtaking all query types.

If in some queries, in some query types, it's going to be generally the right result to have some short timing, you know pages which have short time on page, like the navigational ones, because they can appreciate that difference in intent. Now this all ties in really well with the yeah, the recent Google API leaks and specifically the last longest clicks attribute which is held against documents. And this is to show that you know this is a, a marker that comes up, an attribute, the schlag, when you know you go to your query, you go to a page, you click it, click that result, then you don't come back, you don't come back and click the results. So it's eventually a really good signal to say, actually, this page really answered this users intent, intent and you know, as it's obviously the relevant and useful resource for them, and that's like a really, really good marker obviously. So how is all this useful for SEO? Well, obviously it means you know you've got to really think about creating articles, information that actually really answers the user's queries.

Um, it's really really important to either give the person who's coming onto your page the right place to go next. So this is like a case of, okay, you've arrived on this page and this is how we're going to answer your question, but here's all these other relevant documents you might want to go to. So if you can start someone's journey and answer all their questions rather than leaving them with more that mean they're going to have to go back and see if another page answers that better, that's a really good thing to try and work on. And, you know, just be exhaustive if you can on the topic. You know, um, this is why it fills in nice quite nicely with our philosophy keywords people use on basing your content around answering people's questions rather than just targeting, you know, volume keywords in a way that's kind of haphazard.

You know if you're thinking about questions and answering them in full and answering related queries within your pages and any other pages that you link to. So, for example, you know, like I mentioned in the glossary article podcast that I did a week or so ago, where I said you know it's really good of a glossary so you can link to those that terminology where someone reading who's new to your topic area and reading for the first time. If they come across terminology they don't understand at least they can you can link to it and it's stay. It keeps them within your site rather than having to bounce back to the search results. So that could be a positive thing to do. So, yeah, it does show the importance of answering a question well rather than just trying to gain. You know, gain the click without worry worrying about whether you actually keep people on site. So just gaining the click isn't going to help. What you want to do is gain the click and keep attention is the really important takeaway from this. So, anyway, I hope that's been useful. As I say, the actual patent that relates to this is linked to in the show notes, so do go and read it. They can be a bit hard going, but just persevere with them because you can glean so much from them. Really recommend that. So, anyway, until next time, see you later.

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