User tracking and search engine rankings

The discussion is appearing more often lately: are search engines tracking user’s movements in order to help determine search engine rankings? The answer, for the most part, seems to be “maybe”. No one has a hard time understanding why search engines would want to analyze surfer’s habits: it’s a great way to tell how usable a website is. Users who hit the “back button” fast on a website would seem to indicate that the website they visited was either lousy, or not relevant for their search term.

The rumors are circulating fast that user metrics are finding their way into all the major search algos, and it has some people worried. The worrying seems premature. User metrics are being used, according to a source who wishes to remain unknown, at a major search engine, but the effect will provide more of a bonus to good sites, rather than penalizing bad ones.

The main concern with a plan like this is: the rich get richer. If you’re already a popular website, then user metrics will clearly favor you staying on top. Less popular websites would probably not show the same quality, at least not initially. As time wore on, and more users surfer the website more often, the metrics would presumably improve, and SERPS would strengthen.

In truth, this “news” can’t mean much to the average webmaster.  Hopefully, you’re already building your website to be usable.  If not, you’re probably already building a website that uses short term tactics, and you’re planning on having a short run anyway. Truly bad websites will result in spam complaints anyway, so the user metrics shouldn’t have a big impact anyway.  Build your website to be the best possible, and you’ll already be set up to handle any changes that the search engines throw at you.