Does Google monitor which links are actually followed?
-
If a link to my site is posted on another site and many people start following that link and they stay on my site for a while, and I also have GA set up, does Google factor that information back into the Google rankings? In other words, are there ways that Google tries to use clicks and bounce rates and other user behavior to determine page rank and domain rank?
Best,
Christopher -
Nikele, that's a fairly broad statement. I don't think you mean to say that if I use Bing on Firefox that they monitor what I do, provided I don't have a Google toolbar enabled.
They do keep track of many things, but you generally need to be using their search engine, or the Chrome browser, or have their toolbar installed.
They don't always reveal what factors they use in rankings, but have said that they don't use Google Analytics data in ranking.
-
Hi, very simple. Google monitor everything. Even if you type something in the browser end you don't push enter. So imagine about links..
-
Thanks for the quick response. I'm not sure I worded my question well. I'm not asking about follow versus no follow or any other attribute that can be determine by crawling the web. I'm asking about user behavior. Does Google monitor user behavior to help determine page and domain rank?
Best,
Christopher -
Christopher - you cover just 2 of the soft and hard values that the big G uses to give the page/domain rank.
Keep in mind that a while back - no-follow links were not crawled by the BOTS - but more recently than not - it seems that all links are crawled and given some value.
This is to ensure that you are not selling large quantities of links and or linking to adult/gambling sites.
But remember - what "gives" rank is a lot more in depth.
your pal
Chenzo
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
-
Recovering from a Google penalty
Hi there, So about 3.5 weeks ago I noticed my website (www.authenticstyle.co.uk) had gone from ranking in second place for our main key phrase "web design dorset" to totally dropping off the SERP's for that particular search phrase - it's literally no where to be seen. It seems that other pages of my website still rank, but the homepage. I then noticed that I had an unread alert in my Google Search Console account to say that a staging site we were hosting on a subdomain (the subdomain was domvs.authenticstyle.co.uk) had hacked content - it was a couple of PDF files with weird file names. The strange thing is we'd taken this staging site down a few weeks earlier, BUT one of my staff had left an A record set up in our Cloudflare account pointing to that staging server - they'd forgotten to remove it when removing the staging site. I then removed the A record, myself and submitted a reconsideration request on Google Search Console (which I still haven't received confirmation of) in the hope of everything sorting itself out. Since then I've also grabbed a Moz Pro account to try and dig a little deeper, but without any success. We have a few warnings for old 404's, some missing meta descs on some pages, and some backlinks that have accumulated over time that have hghish spam rating, but nothing major - nothing that would warrant a penalty as far as I can tell. From what I can make out, we've been issued a penalty on our homepage only, but I don't understand why we would get penalised for hacked content if that site domvs.authenticstyle.co.uk no longer existed (would it just be due to that erroneous A record we forgot to remove?). I contacted a few freelance SEO experts and one came back to me saying I'd done everything correctly and that I should see our site appearing again in a few days after submitting the reconsideration request. Its been 3 weeks and nothing. I'm at a huge loss as to how my site can recover from this. What would you recommend? I even tried getting our homepage to rank for a variation of "web design dorset", but it seems our homepage has been penalised for anything with "dorset" in the keyphrase. Any pointers would be HUGELY appreciated. Thanks in advance! Will
Technical SEO | | wsmith7270 -
No follow links on a blog
Hi On our blog, we have a section called 'Tags'. I have just noticed that these links are all "no follow" links. The tags section does appear on every single page on the blog - is this recommend to have them as 'no follow' links or should I get our developer to change them. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Andy-Halliday0 -
Google Sitemap - How Long Does it Take Google To Index?
We have changed our sitemap about 1 month ago and Google is yet to index it. We have run a site: search and we still have many pages indexed but we are wondering how long does it take for google to index our sitemap? The last sitemap we put up had thousands of pages indexed within a fortnight, but for some reason this version is taking way longer. We are also confident that there are no errors in this version. Help!
Technical SEO | | JamesDFA0 -
How Google can interpret all "hreflag" links into HTML code
I've found the solution. The problem was that did not put any closing tag into the HTML code....
Technical SEO | | Red_educativa0 -
Google Sitelinks
We have an e-commerce site that has about 50k pageviews of our main shop page every week. However in our Google sitelinks we have one for 'Shop'. However, for the Shop sitelink Google is linking to a random URL that we have never & would never use as a URL and not to our Shop page. I can't work out why Google would pick up this random url as we have so many links etc to the main shop page. Why are they not linking to the right page? I have blocked that url in webmaster tools and done a redirect but I want to understand why it happened in the first place. It included 'swedish+fish' so it seems weirdly spammy?! Any thoughts would be really helpful (and I am only mildly techy). Many thanks
Technical SEO | | ahamill0 -
Image Link
If I have an image that is well optimiswed for a keyword that the page it is on is ranking for but i put a no follow in the image link - is this going to lose the value of the image on that page. A strange question i know but this image i have on my homepage is optimised around a keyword, the image is also a link but when i changed the link in the image to no follow i seem to have dropped rankings for that keyword. Probably consicidence but i thought i would throw this question out there and get some views?
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Link Share Matrix
Our developers have requested our "Link Share Matrix" - does anyone know what a Link Share Matrix is? Google and the Wiki haven't provided any decent results so I still don't know exactly what it is. Thanks in advance 🙂
Technical SEO | | Seaward-Group0 -
Add to Cart Link
We have shopping cart links (<a href's,="" not="" input="" buttons)="" that="" link="" to="" a="" url="" along="" the="" lines="" of="" cart="" add="" 123&return="/product/123. </p"></a> <a href's,="" not="" input="" buttons)="" that="" link="" to="" a="" url="" along="" the="" lines="" of="" cart="" add="" 123&return="/product/123. </p">The SEOMoz site crawls are flagging these as a massive number of 302 redirects and I also wonder what sort of effect this is having on linkjuice flowing around the site. </a> <a href's,="" not="" input="" buttons)="" that="" link="" to="" a="" url="" along="" the="" lines="" of="" cart="" add="" 123&return="/product/123. </p">I can see several possible solutions: Make the links nofollow Make the links input buttons Block /cart/add with robots.txt Make the links 301 instead of 302 Make the links javascript (probably worst care) All of these would result in an identical outcome for the UX, but are very different solutions. What would you suggest?</a>
Technical SEO | | Aspedia0