It's well known that traffic and SERP CTR has a significant impact on rankings. About a year ago, I wrote a post on my blog about how to write a bot in Ruby using Watir, and I submitted it here. Within 24 hours, I had gotten over 1000 uniques and had a front page ranking for the term "ruby bot" and "ruby web bot". I run Google Analytics on my blog, and Google has provisions in its algorithm to account for "breaking news" and because my site rapidly received traffic and links, they chucked it up onto the front page for these terms.

I've maintained the rankings because of the links I received during that traffic spike as well as the traffic coming in through the search engine results. What better way for Google to test whether a site is actually decent or not than to rank it quickly because it's getting traffic, then keep it there or drop it based on the CTR and Bounce Rate of the site? It's possible to game these metrics, but not as easily as something like link or content spam.

For reference, the blog post is: http://www.layeredthoughts.com/automation/how-to-write-your-...