Google has admitted it: traffic has an influence on rankings

jneill21 said:

For a long time, Google has always claimed that traffic is not a ranking factor, probably to prevent traffic spam in order to achieve better rankings. But in the last month there were a few side notes from top google employees and they have admitted that traffic has an impact on rankings. Many SEOs have always blocked this topic directly I guess because it's just simple but still shady.

I have seen two projects in the last 3 months that were ranking in the TOP 5 for high volume keywords but having low DRs. And the best thing is that the keyword did not even appear directly on the target page, i.e. the content was not even optimized or 100% good. Only the semantic keyword appeared on the page.

Here is my summary of what I noticed:
- the two keywords had a high volume of 7k and the TOP 10 domains ranking for it had a DR of 50-70
- the keyword difficulty was 4/10
- the two projects had only a DR of 25 and 28 - also only 1-2 backlinks on the target page and no anchor text related to the keyword set
- both projects did intensive social media marketing and the volume of the brand search was 400-600 (which is good for start-ups)

There are two factors for me why these small projects were ranking in the Top 5:
- The overall traffic due brand search because of their intensive social media marketing
- Both projects had backlinks to their main page from 2-3 start-up sites (like kickstarter.com) what causes google maybe to classify the content as particularly new, trendy and relevant

What do you think? Is traffic maybe more important that we think? Do you have any experience with fake traffic to boost rankings?

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But in the last month there were a few side notes from top google employees and they have admitted that traffic has an impact on rankings.

Click to expand...