Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Black hat : raising CTR to have better rank in Google
-
We all know that Google uses click-through-rate (CTR) as one of it is ranking factor.
I came up with an idea in my mind. I would like to see if someone saw this idea before or tried it.
If you search in Google for the term "SEO" for example.
You will see the moz.com website in rank 3. And if you checked the source code you will see that result 3 is linking to this url:
That url will redirect you to seomoz.com
Ok, what if we use linkbucks.com or any other cheap targeted traffic network and have a campaign that sends traffic to the url that I show you.
Will that count as traffic from Google so it will increase the CTR from Google?
-
Ok here is how I will respond to this question.
There are tons of signal that Google uses in order to rank a website against a query. CTR can be one of them but I see two problems here:
- Bounce rate. The bounce rate of the traffic will be high and this might give Google a hint that the website is getting a fake or unrealistic traffic.
- Amount of traffic from one source. The website that you are going to use will send the direct traffic or referral traffic from multiple (yet) limited sources and I am sure none of them will be reputable in the eye of Google which again make the case suspicious.
We might see an increase in rankings in the beginning but it might fall down again in weeks of time so I guess for long term, this idea is a waste, plus this can hurt you as well.
Now, I will move to the EGOL’s idea of how you should be working instead. I think the better idea is to work on legit ideas that give a real boost to your website rankings will help in the longer run and make you a brand which otherwise is not possible.
Hope this helps!
-
Will that count as traffic from Google so it will increase the CTR from Google?
It is a good bet that Google uses multiple metrics that confirm one another to be sure that their rankings are not manipulated. That traffic would also need to explore deep into the site, talk about it in social media, write about it on blogs, return many times over a long course of time by typing the domain name into search boxes or the address window of the chrome browser.
So, instead of trying to fool google, just improve your website so that these things happen on their own.
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
-
High Rank and Traffic of low DA and Backlinks
Hi guys, is a pleasure being a part of this community, hope in learning a lot with you guys, i just started a year learning about SEO and it been a big journey. I was looking at some competition of some websites that i been optmizing, and i found a website that called my attention and i cant figure out whats going on, it haves huge traffic but in terms of technicall SEO is really week, and not just this but also in terms of DA and backlinks (most of them spammy - 20 backlinks), the domain in question is bhnews.com.br I notice that doesnt have any social media, not analytics, etc. The only thing that i notice is that there is a website or a company called "BH news" (televesion), but its not related with it, since the type of information that bhnews.com.br presents is "lottery" results. So this kind of situation confuses me a lot, because is a lot of hard work in optmizing a website to rank in google, and than i come a across with this type of website with 20 backlinks (most of anchor or name of domain), and than haves like 2M visits per month and ranks for keywords related with the this type of sites of lottery. Can someone tell me if there is some kind of black seo, or something that is making this rank so high? regards
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jogobicho0 -
What to do with internal spam url's google indexed?
I am in SEO for years but never met this problem. I have client who's web page was hacked and there was posted many, hundreds of links, These links has been indexed by google. Actually these links are not in comments but normal external urls's. See picture. What is the best way to remove them? use google disavow tool or just redirect them to some page? The web page is new, but ranks good on google and has domain authority 24. I think that these spam url's improved rankings too 🙂 What would be the best strategy to solve this. Thanks. k9Bviox
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AndrisZigurs0 -
How to make second site in same niche and do white hat SEO
Hello, As much as we would like, there's a possibility that our site will never recover from it's Google penalties. Our team has decided to launch a new site in the same niche. What do we need to do so that Google will not mind us having 2 sites in the same niche? (Menu differences, coding differences, content differences, etc.) We won't have duplicate content, but it's hard to make the sites not similar. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Forcing Google to Crawl a Backlink URL
I was surprised that I couldn't find much info on this topic, considering that Googlebot must crawl a backlink url in order to process a disavow request (ie Penguin recovery and reconsideration requests). My trouble is that we recently received a great backlink from a buried page on a .gov domain and the page has yet to be crawled after 4 months. What is the best way to nudge Googlebot into crawling the url and discovering our link?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Choice0 -
Does Trade Mark in URL matter to Google
Hello community! We are planning to clean up TM and R in the URLs on the website. Google has indexed these pages but some TM pages are have " " " instead displaying in URL from SERP. What's your thoughts on a "spring cleaning" effort to remove all TM and R and other unsafe characters in URLs? Will this impact indexed pages and ranking etc? Thank you! b.dig
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | b.digi0 -
Negative SEO - Case Studies Prove Results. De-rank your competitors
Reading these two articles made me feel sick. People are actually offering a service to de-rank a website. I could have swore I heard Matt Cutts say this was not possible, well the results are in. This really opens up a whole new can of worms for google. http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2369-case-study-negative-seo-results/ http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2372-successful-negative-seo-case-study/ This is only going to get worse as news like this will spread like wildfire. In one sense, its good these people have done this to prove it to google its just a pity they did it on real business's that rely on traffic.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dean19860 -
Is using twiends.com to get twitter followers considered black hatting?
Hi, I've been struggling to get followers on Google Plus and Twitter, and recently stumbled upon twiends.com. It offers an easy service that allows you to get twitter followers very quickly. Is this considered black hating? Even if Google doesn't consider the followers as valid, am I likely to be punished if using their service? Even if it doesn't help rankings, it is nice to have lots of followers so that they will see my tweets which has the potential to drive more traffic to my site, and give awareness to my business. What are your thoughts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | eugenecomputergeeks0 -
How do I find out if a competitor is using black hat methods and what can I do about it?
A competitor of mine has appeared out of nowhere with various different websites targetting slightly different keywords but all are in the same industry. They don't have as many links as me, the site structure and code is truly awful (multiple H1's on same page, tables for non-tabular data etc...) yet they outperform mine and many of my other competitors. It's a long story but I know someone who knows the people who run these sites and from what I can gather they are using black hat techniques. But that is all I know and I would like to find out more so I can report them.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kevin11