Continuing the discussion from
Just out of curiosity, if this holds true, in a scenario where a business competitor has a lower SEO rating than yours, and has low quality links from obscure places in a language that doesn’t in any way pertain to their site, why might their search ranting be better? You’ll not they do pay for key words and we do not. Would that be the paid keywords be the deciding factor?
errmmm. Sorry, I’m confused.
If you’re referring to the site also having paid advertising with Google, then Google have categorically stated they do not use paid advertising to influence their organic search results in any way.
That’s interesting. Let me give you some solid figures from Ahrefs.
My ranking is the following:
Global 7,210,042 URL 33 Domain 44 Backlinks 1.23K Referring Domains 144
My closest competitor (consistently appears directly above me in searches):
Global 11,119,039 URL 14 Domain 42 Backlinks 95 Referring Domains 42
Couldn’t one infer that Google is using paid key words in determining their search results?
That’s not what Google says; quite the opposite.
You might also find this video, about how Google determines search results, of interest:
Thanks TechnoBear. I’ll read the link watch the video.
Far be it from me to question the validity of Google’s statements (notice I didn’t use the “L” word - definitely not going to bite the hand that feeds us!), but I have typically 4 to 5 other sites above me using the most common key word long tail search, and out of all of those, 3 definitely have lower ratings in addition to abysmal back links and referring domains.
The difference? They all use paid keywords.
I fail to see what they would have to gain by being dishonest. If paid advertising really did influence organic search results, it would be in their interests to say so, in the hope of increasing revenue.
IMHO that is the primary reason so many are confused about SEO - they infer
There is nothing that says that even any part of one set of data provided by one entity is related in any way at all to observable conditions of a different entity.
As analogy, I have kept meticulous records that show
85% of the time after I scratch my nose a television commercial comes on within 5 minutes.
It can be inferred that if I scratch my nose more often there will be more television commercials.
Silly? It is to me. Yet it is exactly these kind of “statistics” that some strongly believe in when it comes to SEO
And it is often worse. To continue my analogy
I contacted the television company and they emphatically denied that they use my nose scratching in any way to make decisions on when to air commercials.
I asked my neighbor and brother to also take records of when they scratched their noses and keep track of the observable effect it had on television commercials.
Their data varied somewhat, but it proves that the television company is not telling the truth.
They do use nose scratching events to make decions about commercials.
Even sillier?
Yet
substitute backlinks, keywords, info-graphics, whatever for “nose scratch”
substitute Google for “television company” and
page rank / search position for “commercial”
Point taken.
And I like your analogy. I’m off to watch TV, and I won’t scratch my nose. Therefore, it will be commercial free!
Just to add a bit more into this confusion…
One of the statistics that Google does have into account when calculating your ranking in one page (since only pages rank, not websites) is the amount of traffic you get.
Since you’re paying for those ads, you’re increasing your traffic and that plays in your favor. Now, as important as it is to have traffic, it is also equally important to retain it. And by retaining I mean a) How long a visitor stays in the website in one visit and b) How often the same visitors comes to view the site.
So the number of visitors, their frequency and the time that they spend are important. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you need to obsess yourself with bouncing rates and stuff. The date is there to help you if you know how to understand what’s going on. Only then you can make the right changes.
I admit it, I am even more confused.
How does Google know what traffic I get to my web page/site?
Don’t you know that Google knows everythnig?
Of course, if you use Google Analytics, you make their life so much easier 
But if you use other analytic software, then I don’t know how Google uses traffic for their formula. Of course, tools like Alexa can provide some public data.
Else, I will speculate that Google can get accurate data from pages that are drive traffic to your website and some of them will use Google Analytics and they’re able to estimate the traffic you get.
If a page has GA code easy, the page phones home.
Else I imagine Google uses the click rate of SERP pages to some extent. Which it my do anyway.
If I was running a search engine it would make sense to me that if a majority of users searching for “Cheap Nike Sneakers” clicked through 5 pages of SERPs that I just might have a problem with my ordering algo somewhere.
Except that Matt Cutts has stated quite clearly that Google does not use Analytics data in ranking a site.
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