[Live Case study] CTR Manipulation Vs Link Building

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If you did your basic onpage homework, it's all content and links. It's that easy. Works perfectly fine, even for the toughest terms, without fancy stuff like social signals, CTR manipulation and whatever. Great content, powerful links, ranks every time.

I don't say CTR is no ranking factor at all, but I'd rather turn the two huge gearwheels instead of wasting time and money on a small one.
 
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Good luck with that but I doubt CTR manipulation will have any effect. It might be a little bit of a factor if you are in top 10..
 
thebat1980 said:
I think time on site and actually emulating a human with a mouse - like hovering over things and clicking other links would help. But sure that G knows a paid for bot as opposed to a real search request!
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This is exactly right IME.

The MS-component based bots out there that use a web component or fake browser to click serps is useless.

But real human clicks and some random browsing are definitively effective. Remember the chrome browser is sending telemetry to google.
 
I used his service and did have good result last summer across a few keywords.

Please note that all my pages were ranked on lower first page, i used it to boost it to top #3 and it worked for me.
 
If you get real clicks because you got boosted to top 3 than there shouldn't be a big loose when stopping serpclicks because you get now real clicks instead of fake ones?
 
There are 3 obvious issues that come to mind when these services are mentioned.
  1. Google knows that very few people click on results past the top of the first page, and especially past the first page. So why would they care about the CTR results past this?
  2. Even if it improves your ranking to the top of the first page, your CTR will drop if you turn it off. It will drop quite a bit if your meta title and description are crap.
  3. If the service does not use residential IPs, Google can easily filter out non-residential IPs.
Though in the case of SerpClix, they supposedly have real users. However, this increases the cost and makes #2 more of a concern.
 
Well I tested it on some of my sites, was #5 for low volume keyword, got the same $47 package and made sure the clicks delivered but no results.
There might be some more factors but for me it didn't work, and honestly if it would work so easily people were spamming this to death. It's obvious that there are much more factors there.
 
This won't work for a fresh page that's ranking nowhere, it'll only work for a page that's already ranking on page 1
 
Peter Ngo said:
Yep, the thing to note about is that you need to have good snippet as well.
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Thanks for clarifying that your rankings remained when you stopped using the service. I guess it all works like a self-fulfilling prophecy. You fake your way from the lower positions of the 1st page, and once you are in the top positions, you get the inherent benefits of better CTR even if you no longer use fake clicks. As long as your title and description don't suck, of course. It makes sense. But as some people pointed out, Google knows a thing or two about fake traffic, after all they make a crapload of money from click-based ads.

Many variables to keep into account. One of them probably is that the search result you are trying to manipulate should already be on the 1st page for the query. Volume of searches and volume of fake traffic might be important too.
 
Ste Fishkin said:
Since @macdonjo3 launched his CTR manipulation service I've been waiting for a real review.

Not because I give a fuck or I'm excited about it or anything, I just want to see if it works.

Unfortunately the only reviews I've seen are from people I've never heard of or blog posts that Josh himself shares... I don't really totally trust anything he's done or shared or I've seen.

I'm not calling Josh untrustworthy or anything, but if I created a service like this I would be bias as fuck also.

So what are we going to do
Over the next few weeks we're going to see the short term and long term effects of CTR manipulation, we're also going to compare it to traditional link building and "normal" SEO.

On top of that we're going to have a control test, a web property that will have nothing done to it so we can confirm that the effects of both of these techniques are the reason for any success that we see.

How exactly am I going to do this
Building this out with being as fair as possible will not be as simple as you think.

Building 3 separate websites with 0 authority is time consuming, slow and there are too many variables. So we're going to be building 3 parasite pages on the same platform.

I will focus on the following:
  • Everything will be the same, a 1500-2000 word article on the keyword.
  • Use of partial match/LSI keywords will be used in the content.
  • Headers/titles/meta info will be the same
  • Keyword density will be the same
  • They will contain 3 OBL's to relevant authority sites
  • They will be left to age for 2 weeks before we being the CTR/link building
  • The keyword they all target will be the same
I can't see a fairer way to do this.

There will be 3 properties built:
  • A control that will have nothing done to it, no links, no CTR.
  • A property for CTR manipulation only
  • A property for link building only
The money spent on each strategy will be the same, $47 over a month.

This is the lowest SERPClix package

I will not be sharing URL's until the experiment is over and if possible I will be tracking analytics (to actually see the clicks provided) to see if Josh does anything stupid and provides extra clicks to make sure his service gets good results. I should only expect 107 clicks according to the SERPClix website.

The service I use will be a SEO package, I've not looked for one which matches the budget and requirements yet.

How are you measuring results
When I have built all the properties I will use SERPBook to share the results live, so you can check in and see the exact results you see whenever you want to see them. I will be editing this post and keeping it up to date over time.

What do you think, is this a fair test, what can be improved?

What do you think we will see?
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Will definitely have a look at this one, sounds interesting. In the beginning I was shocked because I wasn't able to find some kind of trolling altough I saw it's your thread and was really expecting it. Nevertheless wasn't disappointed by what I've read.
 
Have tested numerous CTR manipulation services in the past (not SERPClix though) and they had zero or minimal effect on rankings.

CTR does affect rankings obviously but no bot or service I have tried has been worth the effort.

If two sites are the same or pretty equal then possibly it may push one site ahead but not worth the time, cost, effort.

IMO Google can identify between fake and genuine search queries, or they should have enough data to be able to do so, and it would be easy to implement a penalty for fake search clicks.



@MatthewWoodward or some dude called Adi did a similar case study with PandaBot,
http://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/tutorials/rank-website-fake-usage-metrics-no-backlinks-required/
 
Google has been using CTR as a factor from about 2007? Or maybe even before, the intricacies today to get that to work probably wouldn't be worth it. I was going to look into it myself the other day but just didn't bother. As someone said, you'd need to be on first page or second page, the lower you are the less effective, Always have a slightly above average ctr, and below average bounce, mix up the keywords, with random sentence long tails a whole l0tta shit. Don't think it's worth it, but good luck
 
From the looks of it, CTR manipulation has the most IMMEDIATE effects when targeting LOCAL search terms
 
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