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
-
How long does google takes to crawl a single site ?
lately i have been thinking , when a crawler visits an already visited site or indexed site, whats the duration of its scanning?
Algorithm Updates | | Sam09schulz0 -
Google creating it own content
I am based in Australia but a US founded search on 'sciatica' shows an awesome answer on the RHS of the SERP https://www.google.com/search?q=sciatica&oq=sciatica&aqs=chrome.0.69i59.3631j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 The download on sciatica is a pdf created by google. Firstly is this common in the US? secondly any inputs on where this is heading for rollout would be appreciated. Is google now creating its own content to publish?
Algorithm Updates | | ClaytonJ0 -
Google SERPs changes
Hi I wonder if anyone knew of any changes to the Google SERPs appearance in August 2015? We dropped in over a thousand visits to the homepage on brand so I wanted to find out why. Also, our DA went from 36 to 34 - does Google panda affect domain authority at all? Thank you
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey0 -
Google October 2015 Algorithm Update?
According to Accuranker (https://www.accuranker.com/blog/google-october-2015-algorithm-update/), "Google has made some big changes to their algorithm". Other than that one article, I haven't noticed or even heard of any considerable fluctuations. Even Mozcast is looking pretty normal today. Has anyone noticed anything or have any other sources on this? If so, any ideas on what this update seems to be targeting?
Algorithm Updates | | Silkstream0 -
Google keyword tool
I was quite happy with google keyword tool for basic and accurate searches for keywords. Can anyone suggests a new tool that will give accurate search volume on google ( country specific ) I am not interest in info for adwords, and find a keyword planner tool way out in traffic results, compared to Keyword tool. Is the keyword tool completely gone?
Algorithm Updates | | summer3000 -
Site not in Google top 50 for key terms
Dear Moz Community, Our site - http://www.sportsdirectnews.com publishes a high volume of daily sport stories and aims to follow Google's Webmaster Guidelines, yet our pages don't appear anywhere in Google's SERP's. We've looked in details at the issue and think it could be something to do with: a) Unusual links or b) High page loading time or c) Too many on-page links If you could have a look at the site - http://www.sportsdirectnews.com - and give your professional opinion as to why our website is not appearing in SERP's, we would be most appreciative. SDN
Algorithm Updates | | BoomDialogue690 -
How to show your ratings in the Google SERP
I've noticed that some organic search results are showing ratings just above the meta tag. How are these sites doing this? Example: If you search "cash advance", there is a result between #4 and #6 in the organic results. The site is "goldcashadvance.com". It's showing a 5-star rating in the result.
Algorithm Updates | | sparagi0 -
Website "penalized" 3 times by Google
I have a website that I'm working with that has had the misfortune of gaining rankings/traffic on Google, then having the rankings/traffic removed...3 times! (Very little was changed on the site to gain or lose "favor" with Google, either.) Notes: Site is a mixture of high quality original content and duplicate content (vacation rental listings) When traffic crashes, we lose nearly all rankings and traffic (90+%) When traffic crashes, we lose all rankings sitewide, including those gained by our high quality, unique pages None of the "crash" dates appear to coincide with any Panda update dates We are working on adding unique content to our pages with duplicate content, but it's a long process and so far doesn't seem to have made any difference I'm confounded why Google keeps "changing its mind" about our site We have an XML sitemap, and Google keeps our site indexed pretty well, even when we lose our rankings Due to the drastic and sitewide loss of rankings, I'm assuming we are dealing with some sort of algorithmic penalty Timeline: Traffic steadily grows starting in Jan 2011 Traffic crashes on Feb 19, 2011. We assumed it was due to a pre-panda anti-scraper update, but don't know. Google sends traffic to our site on March 1, then none the next day On June 16th, I block part of the site using robots.txt (most of the section wasn't indexed anyway) On June 17th, Google starts ranking our site again. I thought it might be due to the robots.txt change, but I had just made the change a few hours ago, and Google wasn't even indexing the part of the site I blocked Traffic/rankings crash again on July 6th. No theory why. Site URL: http://www.floridaisbest.com Traffic Stats: Attached I know that we need more backlinks and less duplicate content, but I can't explain why our Google rankings are "on again, off again". I have never seen a site gain and lose all of its rankings/traffic so drastically multiple times, for no apparent reason. Any thoughts or ideas would be welcome. Thanks! t8IqB
Algorithm Updates | | AdamThompson0