Why you can’t trust the SEO experts

Today, I stumbled across one of the best examples of "on page" optimization i’d seen in a while. Brilliantly done, easy to grasp… So I sent it to a staff member.

Later, Reading further down into the article I see A HUGE LIE that SEO’s around the world are still telling, that’s *still* not true!

Google is not using click volume data to decide it’s rankings!

SEOmoz isn’t completely to blame, they claim to have gotten their information by surveying some "72 SEO’s" at least they didn’t say they studied 72 experts, because this article had the makings of being a top resource… Untill they brought up CTR.

Some folks, perhaps some who truly *WISH* Google used CTR, believe that Google uses search metrics or analytics data (Traffic stats) to rank a website higher. In otherwords, If people click on #3 more often than they click on #1, their page will move up in the rankings.

This is the scary reason why even reading stuff from SEOmoz can get you into trouble, if you haven’t been doing your homework or studying. It also says why hiring just any old SEO can be scary.

Why would google NOT use click volume data for ranking?

Simple. Aaron Wall had a sickly sweet dripping with content and oozingly good post about the value of a ranking ages ago , where he outlined how leaked data from sources like AOL and other HUGE search engines that people ALWAYS (43% or higher) click the first result no matter what in practically any niche. THen 11% click number 2 etc. These numbers do NOT change dramatically from niche to niche.

What does that tell you? The data would be **USELESS**.

Google has said several times "we don’t use analytics data for rankings"

Like In the youtube video titled "Is SearchWiki or Analytics data used for ranking? "
Or here when Matt Cutts Says "changes don’t affect your search rankings."
when reffering to search wiki ( a ranking voting system)
Google Analytics Terms of Service : "Your website data will not be used to affect your natural search results"
Even Peter Norvig , (Director of Research & Search Quality) at Google said:

"Google does collect such data, and has scads of it stashed away on their clusters. However — and here’s the shocker — these metrics are not very sensitive to new ranking models! When Google tries new ranking models, these metrics sometimes move, sometimes not, and never by much. In fact Google does not use such real usage data to tune their search ranking algorithm." – Peter Norvig (See Entire Conversation here )

What’s that mean? It means that this "click data" doesn’t change much when they change algorithms! It means when they put futureshop above best buy, the click data doesn’t change #1 still gets 43% and #2 around 11% !!!

Careful trusting guys like SEOmoz, they’ve falsely reported this kind of stuff before…

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/proof-google-is-using-behavioral-data-in-rankings

Until Next Time,

Daniel J Deyette