Google's New Detection Factor - Revealed

op too old news and it's not new !

PartyNeon said:

After carefully analyzing the analytics for a dozen sites, I am convinced that Google is analyzing time on site, in comparison to your competitors, to penalize sites that don't belong in top rankings.

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can you explain why my website with default wordpress installation is in top 10 of google? no content, no promotion made.

bobgoe said:

I have not installed the google analytics in my site , Call me paranoid i don't want google to acess my sites data by installing there code to my site I am using statcount and satisfied with it

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Me too.

I might be a little more paranoid than you. haha

I refuse to use chrome, android devices, toolbars, basically ANYTHING Google has.

I never use analytics in my websites. I don't want Google to know about my bounce rate or the time spent on them. It's clear that time spent on the site, bounce rate and page speed can affect your rankings and it's not a new thing.

Hmm... Interesting
Many people are opening new link in new tab also.And leave page buy closing it. Still if this is right it only point same thing again. Make quality pages - people will link ,click ,stay longer etc.

OP I agree with you and started a similar thread a few days ago. I think you can add social signals to the list of high importance to google. Think about it from their perspective, of wanting to provide the most relevant and authoritative sites to users. Algorithms and math can only tell them so much so if not already so, certainly in the future , user behavior ( time on site, page views, bounce rare, social interactions/ shares) will play an very important role in the SERPS

I don't use Analytics at all and I dropped severely across almost every kw.

IMO they're placing a heavy value on who the site is designed for; search engines or people. You really need to be careful with your kw density and anchor text now, because it looks to me like they are looking very closely at how your site is structured and whether it makes sense for it to be structured that way for humans.

My main site was built mainly for search engines, things like having the kw in the page name/slug (so "Keyword Videos" as opposed to "Videos") and it has dropped drastically on well over 50+ ranking kw's. Two other sites of mine which were not built in this way have in fact gone up in ranking.

Just my 2c

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I agree this is exactly what I think its all about. Looking at the sites of mine that dropped and the ones that didn't, the ones that did all have keywords, in the slug, title, links and alt tags, looking through the sites that people have posted on the webmasters blog they all seem to follow the same pattern also. Just not sure if its too early to go through changing everything incase google make some more changes.

The main argument I would make against your point is the fact that many results I have studied mostly contain sites that have NEVER been on the first page. If a site is buried on the 5-10th page of the search results, there wouldn't be any bounce data.

14 is not a valid sample size therefore spearmans is irrelevant. Just FYI.

I have sites with extremely high bounce rates (80%) that jumped to the first page for competitive keywords so this can't be true.

Every keyword that dropped for me had between 1:30 to 12:14 of onsite time. I definitely will be disregarding any notion of on-site time as being a large factor.

I dont think this is the exact one what google do now..There is something with private blog networks and google follows private blogs

Is IP-randomized "site dwelling service" going to be the new SEO method?
One assumes if they can count dwell time, they count visits.

gsy159 said:

That time Shit doesn't worked, my have average time of 5/min an a bounce rate from 19% and my rankins all drops from first page to nowhere, and my site was not a MNS site I hade 2100 pages indexed with about 25.000 pageviews per day

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He's not saying time is the only factor, he's saying it is now a factor. Thats the new news. If your site was built on spammy backlinks or other blackhat techniques, they still might punish you.

themidiman said:

The main argument I would make against your point is the fact that many results I have studied mostly contain sites that have NEVER been on the first page. If a site is buried on the 5-10th page of the search results, there wouldn't be any bounce data.

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Too many people are thinking 3-dimensionally. There's also the factor of TIME, and part of this "dance" everyone thinks is so confusing and mysterious may not be as random as some simple minds may believe. It could be an extremely delibarate effort by Google to test various domains at various positions and compare bounce rates, dwell times, etc... in order to determine who they think should be where.

ALL of the posts I read on this forum assume a static system where Google looks at sites A, B, and C and makes static decisions about where those sites should rank, and then when they dance around a bit, everyone gets confused because after all, the universe is static and this doesn't make any sense.

Here's some new insight to consider. It's NOT static. The Google SERPs are a dynamic environment where Google is testing sites against each other, changing how they rank in the SERPs and comparing how their traffic behaves when site A is #1, B is #2, etc... then change it around and see what Users click and how. Google's single-minded message on content may actually be a serious one. If they have developed the ability to track Users with a workable degree of precision, blackhat techniques may be permanently degraded.

Imagine if you will, what happens when some wildly superior site that has dramatically better content and no PR at all is suddenly thrust for a few hours in position #1 as a test, and the results of that test are the people prefer that site to a much larger, more well-known and older site. Pure meritocracy, as Google defines "merit".

I don't think time on site would necessarily be a quality factor, because some sites could be more focused and the user might just be finding the information they are looking for faster.

HOWEVER, in my own sites, I am seeing a correlation between bounce rate and rankings in the current SERPs.

Remember though - correlation is not cause - it could just be a sign that, despite some anomalies, this update is working much the way Google had intended.

Too many people are thinking 3-dimensionally. There's also the factor of TIME, and part of this "dance" everyone thinks is so confusing and mysterious may not be as random as some simple minds may believe. It could be an extremely delibarate effort by Google to test various domains at various positions and compare bounce rates, dwell times, etc... in order to determine who they think should be where.

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This is a very interesting possibility...
and it's logical - the best way to know what should go where is to test things in different positions...

in this case, a change of appearance (different template) could improve rankings...
it's worth testing at least

agente808 said:

in this case, a change of appearance (different template) could improve rankings...
it's worth testing at least

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I've heard somewhere that people respond better (aka "convert") depending on website appearance factors such as textures. This could also be rolled-into the bundled of factors Google defines as "content". Another way of saying it is "what people like". People like nice colors and nice textures, which means girls and gay men now have an edge in SEO.

Well, I am noticing the keyword I use to rank now on first page all yellow pages, classified and crappy websites are ranking.

They were using Bounce Rate as a ranking factor for a lot of time :kev:

I am taking my code off of a website that ranks #1 on page 6. I will keep you posted if there are any changes. This is a site that used to rank #2 on the 1st page.

PartyNeon said:

After carefully analyzing the analytics for a dozen sites, I am convinced that Google is analyzing time on site, in comparison to your competitors, to penalize sites that don't belong in top rankings.

Googles Logic:
Time on site is the ONLY "black hat proof" factor that they can analyze. If you are sitting 3rd for a keyword with a 15 second time on site, but the sites in 4th and 5th average 2 minutes for that SAME KEYWORD, they deserve higher rankings.

How does google test time on site?
Simple. They can get time on site from checking how long it takes a user to return back to the search result page. When you bounce off a website, you usually click the back button and click the next result in the listing, dont you? When a user finds the site they are looking, they take a long time to return back to google. GOOGLE HAS THIS DATA!

My Proof:
I own 14 websites across 4 niches. (Multiple sites rank for the same keywords). I build similar links to all the sites, you would expect them all to bounce in a similar manner. While some dropped, others held solid. I graphed correlation to ranking changes in Excel, and plotted a bunch of factors, time on site, bounce rate, PageRank, Domain age, and 118 others. I used Spearman correlation, and found that time on site has an extremely high correlation to ranking changes.

How you can help:
Check your analytics. Verify that the keywords with the least time on site are the ones that dropped the most. See if those keywords that have a long time on site stayed relatively solid, even if they had less backlinks.

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This is why i use W3TC , it increases average time on site.