How does Google determine how long a visitor stays on a site?

axelcyril

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How does Google determine how long a visitor stays on a site? page views? avg visit duration?
 
They use time on Google to know time on your site. The more time on your site the less time searchers find other things on Google, as well as the less Google will earn. So, just pump contents that are just enough to read, not too good, or you will be focused by next algorithms.
 
As far as i know Google uses the time spent on your site to determine the quality of your content. So longer is usually better.
 
This will only work if you have enabled the Google Analytics.
But the thing is, GA isn't universal and it's not mandatory so it cants be taken as a signal to improve your rankings
 
As far as i know Google uses the time spent on your site to determine the quality of your content. So longer is usually better.
How would it know that tho?? It can know everything up till the visitor click on your site then it can't really knows what happens within the site
P.S not GA, read my reply above
 
But the thing is, GA isn't universal and it's not mandatory so it cants be taken as a signal to improve your rankings
Yes and that is the only way for complete access. However, I guess there are some workarounds. For example, when you click a search result, Google can keep a record of that time and if you click on the back button on your browser after visiting that page, it can calculate the retention time using referrer & cookies.
 
Only if you are running google ads should you care about this metric. Does not affect organic
 
Only if you have Google analytics installed, Google can tell how your visitors are reacting to each of the pages on your site, plus their individual time spent on each of the pages.
 
This. More than half this forum is using google analytics, but if you check the source code of many elite affiliate sites, majority don't install that crap on their sites.

And, if you are going to get organic traffic from google search, i prefer to install other analytic so they can't 'spy' on you.
 
This. More than half this forum is using google analytics, but if you check the source code of many elite affiliate sites, majority don't install that crap on their sites.

I've never thought of this. So I'd Google analytics actually a bad thing for the owner of the website?
 
I've never thought of this. So I'd Google analytics actually a bad thing for the owner of the website?

If your stats like bounce rate and visit duration are not good, then telling Google about it via analytics can only do harm in my opinion.

However I think the opposite is true as well. A site I built several years ago with a bounce rate of 40% and avg. duration of 2:15 is still ranking for a competitive keyword despite the fact that it hasn't received new backlinks (or updated content) in a very long time. So i think it can also work in your favor.

The problem now is that there's no great alternative to GA, hopefully cloudflare comes up with a good one soon.
 
The new update it will in 2021.

It also calculates how much the traffic moved around each page.

The whole algo being changed or improved.

Everyone will need heatmaps 100% to do SEO
Host server needs to be very fast.
Domain provider needs to be fast.
Your DNS needs to be fast.
Images loading need to be very fast.
So much changing...

Indexing won't happen unless your website meets there minimum speed.

Indexing going to be every 30 days, so if you don't keep traffic busy and your competition get busy there take your place like I said it all changing. (( it looks like a TikTok approach where everyone can get on page 1 or get seen if their website busy.
So the life of SEO as we know it will depend on website busyness not just optimization
Just another SEO brain fuck
))
 
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