March 18, 2013 at 14:04Behavioral ranking factors
Until a computer begins to think like a person, he cannot distinguish a bad site from a good one ... just as a person would. In fact, search engines have in their arsenals techniques for collecting and analyzing data with which silicon brains easily plug into the belt of meat connoisseurs.
Let’s make a reservation right away - by “good” site we mean “worthy of taking a place in the search results for a specific key query”, we will not dive into the jungle of aesthetics of site building.
So, if you don’t go into details, now three approaches are comprehensively applied in search engines: ranking pages by authority (example - the PageRank algorithm that brought Google popularity), behavioral factors (analysis of the actions of real visitors to real sites) and machine learning (example - “MatrixNet” Yandex, which teaches algorithms with assessments of samples by expert assessors, and in fact, links and balances the first two approaches).
The ranking by authority at the early stages of the Internet development worked very well, but in the future the “too mathematical” nature of this approach allowed optimizers to apply tricks using the weaknesses of the system found during experiments. The quality of the search results suffered, search engines introduced corrections, additional formulas and coefficients, filters and sanctions, but a really major breakthrough was made when it became possible to rank sites based on the preferences of their real live visitors. Analysis of behavioral factors is more objective than any personal preferences (both expert and profane), since it works with the preferences of a large sample of the target audience.
How search engines collect data
1 Statistics systems(Google Analytics and Yandex.Metrica). Almost all site owners want to own information about traffic and all actions of the audience. The best, and even free tools for this are provided by search engines, but in return they get huge amounts of data.
2 Browsers. Internet Explorer runs on Bing, Chrome on Google, and Yandex has its own product in this niche. Although Chrome, for example, deeply-deeply in settings where only habrogolevs will climb, provides an opportunity to uncheck the box “Automatically send usage statistics and crash reports to Google”, we cannot guarantee that this deprives the corporation of good access to the data it needs . In general, the data stream from branded browsers is quite substantial, it allows you to additionally cover the segment of sites without statistical systems (or, more often, with competitor statistics systems).
3 Add-ons for browsers.You can evaluate the need for search engines in traffic data by the aggressive promotion of Yandex.Bar. Turning any browser into a "branded" one, the add-on assiduously sends traffic statistics to its native data center.
With the above products, search engines get almost complete information about the behavior of the audience of each indexed site. The next logical step is to show above those sites that, all other things being equal, cause a more positive reaction from visitors. Here, of course, there are subtleties: in some topics, page viewing time will be the main factor for a positive assessment, in others (for example, if a user needs to take one look at the page to perform the required action) - it does not play a special role. Somewhere, the depth of viewing is very important, but if the site consists of one page, then sometimes it is not worth refusing it in high positions. This is where the interpretation and segmentation of data comes into play, as well as machine learning (if assessors constantly give high marks to high-quality one-page promo sites,
Key Behavioral Ranking Factors
1 Bounce Rate(bounce rate) - percentage of visitors who left the site after viewing the login page. For sites that require several transitions to other pages - and most of them - is a very good criterion for quality and relevance to the topic. The visitor leaves the site either because he found the right thing and did what he was going to (and what the site owner needed), or because the site was not liked or irrelevant to the search query. Try to reduce the failure rate - increase relevance, improve design and UX, make landing pages more understandable, attractive and so on. Of course, there will never be an absolute “assimilation” of the audience, but we must strive for this. And last but not least due to the consideration of behavioral factors by search engines,
2 Time spent on the site . A good quality criterion in the vast majority of cases. If a high indicator is achieved not due to incomprehensibility of the content and confusion of navigation. You can increase the viewing time using the simplest everyday logic: give visitors what is interesting to them, and they will devote their time to studying these materials. This can be articles, photo galleries, videos, some services such as mortgage calculators (in the subject of the site, of course), etc. All methods for engagement should not harm the conversion, so do not mechanically add everything to the page in a row.
3 Depth of view.An important criterion for content projects. You can increase the depth due to thoughtful navigation and cross-references, and, of course, interesting content. Many sites try to increase depth by breaking large articles into several parts located on different pages, but this practice is justified only if visitors are highly motivated to read the whole article (this works well for reviews of computer components, but for the continuation of the “humanitarian” article about , as we reorganize Rabkrin, many will refuse to go over).
4 Return to re-search.If the visitor returns from the site back to the search, then he did not find the right one. This parameter can only be controlled by increasing the relevance of landing pages to requests, as well as maintaining a competitive level of prices for goods and services.
5 Return to the site not from the search. If the visitor bookmarked the site or remembered the address, this will be a significant plus in favor of the resource. Nevertheless, it is not worth it to compulsively offer to add the site to bookmarks, this must be done subtly and tastefully.
6 The nature of the movement of the mouse cursor and the pattern of movement on the site.Statistical systems collect data not only about where the visitor clicked, but also how he moved the cursor. This is necessary to build "heat maps of attention", as well as the elimination of attempts to wind behavioral factors with scripts. The patterns of live visitors are rather difficult to emulate, therefore, by the way, many sites that tried to wind up user factors in the first months of their implementation quickly flew down in the SERP or were banned - the search engines noticed that the cursor was controlled not by living people, but by programs. Analysis of the heat map and recordings of viewing sessions will allow, with sufficient time and meticulousness, to identify and remove obstacles on the conversion routes.
7 Snippet clickthrough rate (CTR). The more they click on your snippet (a short description with a link in the search results), the better the search engine treats you. This is logical: if the snippet is relevant to the request and attracts the attention of users, then the site with a high degree of probability will qualitatively respond to the request. There are ways to control the snippet, and you should pay attention to this - quick links, the right title, good text will help increase traffic and position.
8 buttons social networks.If you click on the installed buttons (it’s best not to add AddThis scripts, but the native buttons of the social networks themselves), this will not only increase the number of subscribers to your pages in these social networks, but it will also be an important signal for the quality of the site for search engines. Install the buttons as early as possible - each subscriber will be a significant plus.
conclusions
Search engines fairly objectively and qualitatively analyze data on behavioral ranking factors. Do not try to manipulate them directly (using scripts, buying inappropriate traffic, etc.): this will lead to sanctions, but will not bring any benefits. It is much more effective and more important to really increase the quality of the site, its attractiveness and conversion. Then users will behave as you need, and all of the above indicators and, accordingly, the position of the site will grow.
Let’s make a reservation right away - by “good” site we mean “worthy of taking a place in the search results for a specific key query”, we will not dive into the jungle of aesthetics of site building.
So, if you don’t go into details, now three approaches are comprehensively applied in search engines: ranking pages by authority (example - the PageRank algorithm that brought Google popularity), behavioral factors (analysis of the actions of real visitors to real sites) and machine learning (example - “MatrixNet” Yandex, which teaches algorithms with assessments of samples by expert assessors, and in fact, links and balances the first two approaches).
The ranking by authority at the early stages of the Internet development worked very well, but in the future the “too mathematical” nature of this approach allowed optimizers to apply tricks using the weaknesses of the system found during experiments. The quality of the search results suffered, search engines introduced corrections, additional formulas and coefficients, filters and sanctions, but a really major breakthrough was made when it became possible to rank sites based on the preferences of their real live visitors. Analysis of behavioral factors is more objective than any personal preferences (both expert and profane), since it works with the preferences of a large sample of the target audience.
How search engines collect data
1 Statistics systems(Google Analytics and Yandex.Metrica). Almost all site owners want to own information about traffic and all actions of the audience. The best, and even free tools for this are provided by search engines, but in return they get huge amounts of data.
2 Browsers. Internet Explorer runs on Bing, Chrome on Google, and Yandex has its own product in this niche. Although Chrome, for example, deeply-deeply in settings where only habrogolevs will climb, provides an opportunity to uncheck the box “Automatically send usage statistics and crash reports to Google”, we cannot guarantee that this deprives the corporation of good access to the data it needs . In general, the data stream from branded browsers is quite substantial, it allows you to additionally cover the segment of sites without statistical systems (or, more often, with competitor statistics systems).
3 Add-ons for browsers.You can evaluate the need for search engines in traffic data by the aggressive promotion of Yandex.Bar. Turning any browser into a "branded" one, the add-on assiduously sends traffic statistics to its native data center.
With the above products, search engines get almost complete information about the behavior of the audience of each indexed site. The next logical step is to show above those sites that, all other things being equal, cause a more positive reaction from visitors. Here, of course, there are subtleties: in some topics, page viewing time will be the main factor for a positive assessment, in others (for example, if a user needs to take one look at the page to perform the required action) - it does not play a special role. Somewhere, the depth of viewing is very important, but if the site consists of one page, then sometimes it is not worth refusing it in high positions. This is where the interpretation and segmentation of data comes into play, as well as machine learning (if assessors constantly give high marks to high-quality one-page promo sites,
Key Behavioral Ranking Factors
1 Bounce Rate(bounce rate) - percentage of visitors who left the site after viewing the login page. For sites that require several transitions to other pages - and most of them - is a very good criterion for quality and relevance to the topic. The visitor leaves the site either because he found the right thing and did what he was going to (and what the site owner needed), or because the site was not liked or irrelevant to the search query. Try to reduce the failure rate - increase relevance, improve design and UX, make landing pages more understandable, attractive and so on. Of course, there will never be an absolute “assimilation” of the audience, but we must strive for this. And last but not least due to the consideration of behavioral factors by search engines,
2 Time spent on the site . A good quality criterion in the vast majority of cases. If a high indicator is achieved not due to incomprehensibility of the content and confusion of navigation. You can increase the viewing time using the simplest everyday logic: give visitors what is interesting to them, and they will devote their time to studying these materials. This can be articles, photo galleries, videos, some services such as mortgage calculators (in the subject of the site, of course), etc. All methods for engagement should not harm the conversion, so do not mechanically add everything to the page in a row.
3 Depth of view.An important criterion for content projects. You can increase the depth due to thoughtful navigation and cross-references, and, of course, interesting content. Many sites try to increase depth by breaking large articles into several parts located on different pages, but this practice is justified only if visitors are highly motivated to read the whole article (this works well for reviews of computer components, but for the continuation of the “humanitarian” article about , as we reorganize Rabkrin, many will refuse to go over).
4 Return to re-search.If the visitor returns from the site back to the search, then he did not find the right one. This parameter can only be controlled by increasing the relevance of landing pages to requests, as well as maintaining a competitive level of prices for goods and services.
5 Return to the site not from the search. If the visitor bookmarked the site or remembered the address, this will be a significant plus in favor of the resource. Nevertheless, it is not worth it to compulsively offer to add the site to bookmarks, this must be done subtly and tastefully.
6 The nature of the movement of the mouse cursor and the pattern of movement on the site.Statistical systems collect data not only about where the visitor clicked, but also how he moved the cursor. This is necessary to build "heat maps of attention", as well as the elimination of attempts to wind behavioral factors with scripts. The patterns of live visitors are rather difficult to emulate, therefore, by the way, many sites that tried to wind up user factors in the first months of their implementation quickly flew down in the SERP or were banned - the search engines noticed that the cursor was controlled not by living people, but by programs. Analysis of the heat map and recordings of viewing sessions will allow, with sufficient time and meticulousness, to identify and remove obstacles on the conversion routes.
7 Snippet clickthrough rate (CTR). The more they click on your snippet (a short description with a link in the search results), the better the search engine treats you. This is logical: if the snippet is relevant to the request and attracts the attention of users, then the site with a high degree of probability will qualitatively respond to the request. There are ways to control the snippet, and you should pay attention to this - quick links, the right title, good text will help increase traffic and position.
8 buttons social networks.If you click on the installed buttons (it’s best not to add AddThis scripts, but the native buttons of the social networks themselves), this will not only increase the number of subscribers to your pages in these social networks, but it will also be an important signal for the quality of the site for search engines. Install the buttons as early as possible - each subscriber will be a significant plus.
conclusions
Search engines fairly objectively and qualitatively analyze data on behavioral ranking factors. Do not try to manipulate them directly (using scripts, buying inappropriate traffic, etc.): this will lead to sanctions, but will not bring any benefits. It is much more effective and more important to really increase the quality of the site, its attractiveness and conversion. Then users will behave as you need, and all of the above indicators and, accordingly, the position of the site will grow.