Long Live the Clickstream
This article on search ranking was posted at Platinax this weekend. It examines the death of the once-golden rule of ranking search results by using link data as the measuring stick. As the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) industry has grown, more and more people have become aware of the basic tactics for improving search rankings, weakening the efficacy of those techniques and diluting the pool of relevant results. Not only that, but the engines themselves are getting much better at filtering out the “garbage” from a list of quality search results.
As the author Brian Turner argues, links alone are no longer trustworthy.
The links themselves are not necessarily bad, but Google has always made it perfectly clear that it doesn’t like third-parties having undue influence on Google’s search results.
Google wants to organise the world’s information – not the link builders.
The death of the link is already in process, and actually has been for years.
Some of the more advanced ranking methods, such as studying the Clickstream (the process by which Google tracks user actions to determine a site’s usability, thus affording a higher ranking), are proving to be much more useful since they actually incorporate human behavior data into the equation. This is the future of SEO, Turner says. He argues in favor of this trend, and even includes some tips you can use to better design the information on your site. Better info design is the key to scoring well on Clickstream tests.
So, long gone are the days of adding “Pamela Anderson” to the metadata in all of our page headers. Nobody ever said that building trust in relevancy searches was easy.
