Can visitors duration time affect Google Rankings?
-
Does the time a person stays on a website affect Search Rankings? If so, could the lower time from Adwords Visitors be effecting organic rankings? And the same for bounce rate.
If
Non-Paid Search Traffic Avg. Visit Duration time is 3:55
and
Paid Search Traffic Avg. Visit Duration is 1:59
Could the low duration time be affecting our website rankings?
-
That's a great question!
The thing is, there are websites that naturally have high bounce rates and low avg. visit duration time.
One example is Wikipedia: people google "what year did Titanic sink", get their answer and quit without visiting other pages. Can we say that high bounce rate or low avg. visit duration time negatively affects Wikipedia's rankings? No way!
I think the algorithm Google applies is more complex. The search engine might stereotype the web and assume that in case of insurance websites, for example, visit duration >N and bounce rate
-
Like Syed1 said, it could but probably not much. In light of Panda changes though, this is probably a metric they will start using to measure quality.
There was a blog post on SEOmoz a month ago that quoted Bing saying that they do pay attention to what they call "dwell time". http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-2-user-metrics-that-matter-for-seo The part about about dwell time was about half way down and here is the link from that blog post to what Bing had to say: http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2011/08/02/how-to-build-quality-content.aspx
-
It could. It shouldn't weigh in heavily as 'time on site' does not always equate to quality of page or even the relevancy of the page. Some pages are more useful when short and the 'action' perhaps does not consume a lot of time but I assume Google looks at industry or "website type" averages, sets benchmarks and considers accordingly. This is what I 'think' - not something successfully tested and proven.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Are we confusing Google with our internal linking?
Hi all, We decided to give importance to one of our top pages as it has "keyword" in it's slug like website.com/keyword. So we internally linked even from different sub-domain pages more than homepage to rank for that "keyword". But this page didn't show up in Google results for that "keyword"; neither homepage, but our login page is ranking. We wonder why login page is ranking. Has our internal linking plan confused Google to ignore homepage to rank for that primary keyword? And generally do we need to internally link homepage more than anyother page? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Google sidebar advertising dropped
Has anyone noticed how the google sidebar advertising has completely disappeared? They only display top 4 adwords and then remaining on the bottom of each search page. I can't find any info on it or when it actually happened?
Algorithm Updates | | Purplesars110 -
Need Advice - Google Still Not Ranking
Hi Team - I really need some expert level advice on an issue I'm seeing with our site in Google. Here's the current status. We launched our website and app on the last week of November in 2014 (soft launch): http://goo.gl/Wnrqrq When we launched we were not showing up for any targeted keywords, long tailed included, even the title of our site in quotes. We ranked for our name only, and even that wasn't #1. Over time we were able to build up some rankings, although they were very low (120 - 140). Yesterday, we're back to not ranking for any keywords. Here's the history: While developing our app, and before I took over the site, the developer used a thin affiliate site to gather data and run a beta app over the course of 1 - 2 years. Upon taking on the site and moving to launch the new website/app I discovered what had been run under the domain. Since than the old site has been completely removed and rebuild, with all associated urls (.uk, .net, etc...) and subdomains shutdown. I've allowed all the old spammy pages (thousands of them to 404). We've disavowed the old domains (.net, .uk that were sending a ton of links to this), along with some links that seemed a little spammy that were pointing to our domain. There are no manual actions or messaged in Google Webmaster Tools. The new website uses (SSL) https for the entire site, it scores a 98 / 100 for a mobile usability (we beat our competitors on Google's PageSpeed Tool), it has been moved to a business level hosting service, 301's are correctly setup, added terms and conditions, have all our social profiles linked, linked WMT/Analytics/YouTube, started some Adwords, use rel="canonical", all the SEO 101 stuff ++. When I run the page through the moz tool for a specific keyword we score an A. When I did a crawl test everything came back looking good. We also pass using other tools. Google WMT, shows no html issues. We rank well on Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. However, for some reason Google will not rank the site, and since there is no manual action I have no course of action to submit a reconsideration request. From an advanced stance, should we bail on this domain, and move to the .co domain (that we own, but hasn't been used before)? If we 301 this domain over, since all our marketing is pointed to .com will this issue follow us? I see a lot of conflicting information on algorithmic issues following domains. Some say they do, some say they don't, some say they do since a lot of times people don't fix the issue. However, this is a brand new site, and we're following all of Google's rules. I suspect there is an algorithmic penalty (action) against the domain because of the old thin affiliate site that was used for the beta and data gathering app. Are we stuck till Google does an update? What's the deal with moving us up, than removing again? Thoughts, suggestions??? I purposely, did a short url to leave out the company name, please respect that, since I don't want our issues to popup on a web search. 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | get4it0 -
Responsive websites rank better?
In the upcoming months, or even now, do you think responsive websites will rank higher?
Algorithm Updates | | CFSSEO0 -
Google is forcing a 301 by truncating our URLs
Just recently we noticed that google has indexed truncated urls for many of our pages that get 301'd to the correct page. For example, we have:
Algorithm Updates | | mmac
http://www.eventective.com/USA/Massachusetts/Bedford/107/Doubletree-Hotel-Boston-Bedford-Glen.html as the url linked everywhere and that's the only version of that page that we use. Google somehow figured out that it would still go to the right place via 301 if they removed the html filename from the end, so they indexed just: http://www.eventective.com/USA/Massachusetts/Bedford/107/ The 301 is not new. It used to 404, but (probably 5 years ago) we saw a few links come in with the html file missing on similar urls so we decided to 301 them instead thinking it would be helpful. We've preferred the longer version because it has the name in it and users that pay attention to the url can feel more confident they are going to the right place. We've always used the full (longer) url and google used to index them all that way, but just recently we noticed about 1/2 of our urls have been converted to the shorter version in the SERPs. These shortened urls take the user to the right page via 301, so it isn't a case of the user landing in the wrong place, but over 100,000 301s may not be so good. You can look at: site:www.eventective.com/usa/massachusetts/bedford/ and you'll noticed all of the urls to businesses at the top of the listings go to the truncated version, but toward the bottom they have the full url. Can you explain to me why google would index a page that is 301'd to the right page and has been for years? I have a lot of thoughts on why they would do this and even more ideas on how we could build our urls better, but I'd really like to hear from some people that aren't quite as close to it as I am. One small detail that shouldn't affect this, but I'll mention it anyway, is that we have a mobile site with the same url pattern. http://m.eventective.com/USA/Massachusetts/Bedford/107/Doubletree-Hotel-Boston-Bedford-Glen.html We did not have the proper 301 in place on the m. site until the end of last week. I'm pretty sure it will be asked, so I'll also mention we have the rel=alternate/canonical set up between the www and m sites. I'm also interested in any thoughts on how this may affect rankings since we seem to have been hit by something toward the end of last week. Don't hesitate to mention anything else you see that may have triggered whatever may have hit us. Thank you,
Michael0 -
Local Vs National SEO Rankings
Hi Guys, I just had a quick question, is it truly possible to rank number one worldwide/nationally for a keyword phrase these days such as, Computer repair services. I'm not too concerned with the local serps that come up above the fold. I'm just more concerned, if Google is looking to serve more local results into the regular serps listing? I hope that makes sense thanks. Best, Peter
Algorithm Updates | | PeterRota0 -
Strange Refferral URL coming in from Google
Hi, I've been monitoring my referral URL's coming in and today noticed they had changed. Previously when I clicked one it would be the google search result page - however now they all seem to be like this: http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=7&sqi=2&ved=0CHEQFjAG&url=http://www.mysite.com&rct=j&q=my%20keyword&ei=Bvc3TrbgB5G0hAfvqoSvAg&usg=AFQjCNFONDCPJDl3d2PYceYvale_cL7s4Q All these URL's immediately redirect to my website pages. Do you know what they are - they seem to be tracking URL's of some sort I am thinking?? Are they trying to analyse my site with respect to certain keywords?? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | James770 -
Ranking #1 for Local, Not for National
A client with both a web and brick and mortar store is ranking well for normal web searches locally for many terms but less so nationally. I'm aware that results change due to location and other factors. Specifically, client is wondering if his retail location and corresponding places page are hurting his web results in non-local areas.
Algorithm Updates | | AliveWired0