Many of you have wondered whether a clickthrough from a search engine result gives any boost in overall ranking of a site. This debate has been on and off for a while. Google has admitted tracking user clickthroughs from their results. The ultimate question is do they use it for ranking or boosting ranking for a website,

In My humble opinion Yes Google does track clickthroughs and NO - Google does not use it for ranking purposes.

Take this scenario just taking traffic log of our site we get about 3 to 4 million hits a month and its so difficult to go through just a month of data for a single site. Google is handling billions of queries a day and they need to billions of information per day. This will result in a lot of clickthrough data which will be very very difficult to sort out. Also if Google allows clickthrough data for favour in search engine results then anyone can have a automated bot that will open a search engine results page and generate 1000s of clicks. Or better then can even a hire a group of people and make them click their search results day and night.

Google also has the Toolbar which has been installed in millions of systems. They can actually track the presence of visitors on a site. Say you generate a million clicks but those clicks never results in strong presence on your site then it will send a red alert to google that the users don't like after click through on what they see on that site. GOogle definetely have the capability to do this and most probably this might play a small factor in Search engine rankings though I feel this will be a very small factor.

Also one possibility with all the clickthrough data they collect they can put that to a system where it will analyze the clickthroughs / real presence on website resulting from clickthroughs/ position of sites that were there on a particular SERPs. etc put that to some algorthimic analysis and come out with a data Good enough for their users. This is definetely possible since Google want's to send their visitors to the best results and most relevant sites.

One area where I see Google might definetely see the popularity of a page as well as clickthrough data is the sitelinks. We have over 75 links going out from the homepage but GOogle selected a sitelink that is not in the homepage itself but is linked from a inner page. We know that page is very popular since its a rank checker tool and many people had linked to it.

SEO Blog Team,