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Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

From the article, the interesting factors seem to be things like number of unique visitors and percentage of organic traffic.

The latter is interesting as a factor because it suggests that visitors are visiting for the value rather than because they've been targeted by ads, implying higher value.

Not surprised that some websites have an artificial preference though. It feels like this is basically the selling point (other than privacy) of Kagi, DDG with its bang commands, and other alternative search engines – artificial inflation of rank.

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I find it interesting, that even though many people click on a google link to some page (without checking the url), see the page, in two seconds click back, and choose a different result, that all that doesn't downgrade that pages page rank (if a user (many of them) comes back to search results in two seconds, the content was obviously garbage).

Some pages, that I won't name, but one of them starts with a pin- and ends with -terest consistently get high google results while offering garbage content.

> ...comes back to search results in two seconds, the content was obviously garbage

I don't think that if a user stays a short time necessarily means the content is garbage. It might also mean that the user found directly what he was looking for, such as the answer to the question.

It might even mean the page is very good as it is clear and provides the answer and does not have other click-bait type content.

Landing on a bad page, might require you to read and browse around and maybe after a while figure out it's garbage or you get distracted by some "interesting", but unrelated articles. But if the search engine would rank it high because of this then that would be wrong.

If a user clicks through and don't end up back at the search engine, there is probably a high probability they found the answer whether or not they spent a short or long time at the page. But if they click through and then two seconds later comes back to the search engine results, that seems unlikely.

I tend to scroll down the first few pages of results and open anything that appears interesting even if it's not really relevant to what I wanted. Hopefully that doesn't look similar enough that it might impact the ratings of sites on other search engines. It's possible that the first few results got me to what I was looking for (that's far from a given these days though) but I'm clicking on a lot of other results in a short amount of time regardless.

This would be true, if a user then did another search for something else, or close the tab. If you got an answer, you usually don't come back and click the next link in the results.

For me the pattern changed in the past few years. Before, I would take the first good answer as the answer, they used to be of good quality. Now, I tend to look at a couple (up to 4) of results to kind of cross-validate the answer before using it. Sometimes it takes me quite some "click through the results pages" to find 4 diverse enough results to validate the answer.

But looking at my kids, looking directly at the info box and considering the answer as given by God, I suppose I am an exception.

Well, why would it downgrade pagerank which is based on web graph connectivity? You're not changing the graph in any way with your click, no?

But Google definitely tracks such short clicks and considers them a bad signal, very important in ranking. Same for Yandex, search for "dwell time" (visit duration) in its code/factors.

I often open a bunch of the results in new tabs. Which could be interpreted as I'm unhappy with the first ones I open, but I haven't even looked at them at that point.

Well sure, but i'm sure google can detect if you clicked 5 results in five tabs, or if you've clicked on one, and clicked "back" immeditaly... if a huge amount of users stay only 2-3 seconds on a specific page and then come back, that would be a red flag for me.

On the other hand, maybe some people actually like the pinterest pages in results, and i'm the weird one... who knows.

> On the other hand, maybe some people actually like the pinterest pages in results, and i'm the weird one... who knows.

It isn't just you! I suspect that for certain people it's easy for them to get distracted there though.

Some people believe that it does, that's why they pay users to search for something and click through the serps & go back until they arrive at the target domain where they don't click back but stop the experiment, signalling that this page answered their question / solved their problem.

I've seen some data on this, and that data was inconclusive. Sometimes it seems to work, sometimes it seems to be counter-productive, sometimes nothing happens. It's hard to truly test things in isolation, and maybe their methods were shit, but I don't think it really does anything, or maybe Google has solid ways to detect anomalies and ignore them.

It's possible that is a factor, but that some sites are just very good at boosting the other metrics, or that they provide some other kind of perceived value and are therefore up-ranked.

Do Google et al really not check for that?

Of course they do.

In fact, a good way to downrank a competitors pages is to do a search for them, click the result, then click back 5s later. Repeat 1000x from different google accounts. A week later, the competitor will go off the first page.

Did you try that in practice?

They absolutely do

Yep, would be interesting to test if the "percentage of organic"-factor also is relevant in Google. This would mean that they penalize pages for buying their own product.

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