Brian Mark is currently in Chicago attending a conference, so David and Cshel where kind enough to ask me to fill in on SEO 101 . We where inspired to talk about the recent speculations on how CTR (click through rate) Page views and Time On Site can be a factor that Google is using to determine search positions. This topic came up because we caught an article on sphinn from Bradley Spencer .

Bradley discusses the possibility of Google using CTR as a factor of their organic listings. He came up with some very interesting points that do make a lot of sense. Google is in the business of quality search results, and to do that, Google has created a plethora of different ranking models to keep enhancing their organic results. Being that we are talking about some of the most powerful search technology in the world, it’s not far fetched to consider that not only can they track click through rates, but bounce rates and average time on site stats as well, and have built into their algorithms a ranking model that uses this information. On the surface, this User Experience ranking model should be a great metric. The simple reasoning is that by monitoring what we click on in the search results, Google can determine if a site is drawing the amount of clicks it thinks that position should hold. The more clicks a site gets, and the more time someone spends on a site, or page views, the more it’s showing that it’s performing at a higher position, so they would increase it’s placement in the SERP’s.