Is Google using CTR as a ranking signal?

So, I came across someone asking about a service today… a service that you pay to click on your SERP listings… because, well, that’s going to rank your pages better. Right?

Well… shit. Get it through yer heads folks. User actions are NOT being used to rank web-pages. It really doesn’t make sense that they would. As Matt (Cutts) told me many years ago, they’re “noisy and spammable”. As always, people love to try and sound smart talking about this shit… all the while, knowing very little about Information Retrieval. For me, that’s akin to a web developer that doesn’t know HTML.

Implicit User Feedback – once and for all

First things first, these concepts are actually known primarily as ‘implicit user feedback’. These can include;

Query history (search history)
SERP interaction (clicks, query revisions, selections and bounce rates)
User document behaviour (time on page/site, scrolling behaviour);
Surfing habits (frequency and time of day)
Interactions with advertising
Demographic and geographic
Data from different application (application focus — IM, email, reader);
Closing a window.
And others

And yes, indeed these have been looked at in various Google Patents that I’ve read, (more on that later) and this might lead one to believe that it’s being used. Of course we also know that not all patents aren’t necessarily used or to what extent they might be. Often it’s just to protect IP.

It’s not rocket science; it’s computer science

I have long stood on where I believe this stuff might be implemented. And it’s a short list;

Search Quality – efficacy of the algos
Personalization/Prediction – search history and clicks

But that’s about it. Further to my chats with Matt back in the day, we have Gary Illyes stating, back in 2015 that they use them for “for evaluation and for experimentation – but not for ranking.”

Even for things like so-called Pogo-sticking, John Mueller mentioned this last summer in this video

“We try not to use signals like that when it comes to search. So that’s something where there are lots of reasons why users might go back and forth, or look at different things in the search results, or stay just briefly on a page and move back again. I think that’s really hard to refine and say “well, we could turn this into a ranking factor. So I would not worry about things like that.”

Or hey, maybe another one, this time from Brighton SEO….

“…don’t think we would use that for direct ranking like that. We use signals like that to analyze the algorithms in general, because across a million different search queries we can figure out like which one tends to be more correct or not, depending on where people click. But for one specific query for like a handful of pages, it can go in so many different directions.“

And yea, I am ready for the wackos talking shit like “it’s a Google smokescreen” … yada yada. But hey, when Google says something that fits a given SEO’s world view, it’s the gospel. When it doesn’t? It’s a smokescreen… sigh.

What’s the reality?

As you might be starting to sort out by now, it’s far more likely that this type of signal would be far more likely used to understand the efficacy of the algo(s) performance, than anything else. Let’s now consider the paper; “Incorporating Clicks, Attention and Satisfaction into a Search Engine Result Page Evaluation Model”

In which they mentioned that implicit feedback,

“…gives more accurate predictions of user actions and self- reported satisfaction than existing models based on clicks.”

I strongly encourage you to go have a read on that. We all know one thing; Google is a black box. None of us can sit here and definitively state exactly what goes into a given ranking in a given query space.

What we can do though, is use our knowledge of IR, Google, and our experiences, to at least think about something like this logically. Given the current direction of elements from vectors, voice, machine learning (nope, not going to say RankBRain, shit… I just did)… to predictive stuff like Google Discover; WHY would this even be a ‘thing’? There’s so many other avenues to take in delivering information that the noise/spam issues with these that it just doesn’t make sense.

Caveat

Again, I will note that I’ve read more than a few patents about using implicit user feedback, such as;

Does that mean it’s in use? Of course not. Does that mean they won’t use it in some form some day? Of course not. Does that mean it’s a thing? Dunno. Is the world flat? That used to be a thing, right?

I just don’t see it as something that’s going to be revisited at this point given the myriad of other approaches that they have at their disposal that don’t have noise/spam-potential issues. Take that for what you will.

Anyway, the next time you hear someone professing about this awesome SEO tactic? Just send em over to this article. Aight?

I’m out… until next time…