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Google's New Detection Factor - Revealed

by TheProgrammer
2 replies
  • SEO
    • |
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.
Here's what i got from another forum. Is that correct google noting the time with keywords?
#detection #factor #google #revealed
  • Profile picture of the author GeorgR.
    Good one, but not new. Assessing bounce rate as a factor for site-quality makes A LOT of sense to me.
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  • Profile picture of the author JeanneLynn
    But what about a new site? If I'm building a new site that is a work-in-progress, it may have a higher bounce rate than a long established site.

    A few days before the Penguin update, I put up a new site. It only had about 5 articles (and a 72% bounce rate) when Penguin hit.

    Now this site isn't appearing in the search even if I cut and paste a whole sentence in the search box. I'm starting to worry that my brand new site with no backlinks at all is now penalized.

    I've since put 5 more good articles up and it still isn't showing in the search. Maybe they are penalizing for bounce rates. It's very frustrating. I'm putting up some more content this week and I hope that will help. I hope I'm not going to have to start over again.

    I'm not trying to rank for keywords, just long tail searches.
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