Website promotion by behavioral factors: pros and cons
Recently, behavioral factors are increasingly being talked about as one of the most important criteria that affect the position of a site in search results. What is it connected with and how does it work? Let's figure it out.
In our previous articles, we have already managed to explain the meaning of the term " behavioral factors ", and stipulate its importance as an Internet marketing trend in 2014. Let's not repeat ourselves, let's talk about other important aspects :)
Tracking behavioral factors by search engines
Robots determine the quality of the site and obtain basic information about the user's actions on the site in various ways.
- With the help of browsers, especially branded brainchildren: Chrome, Yandex.Browser.
- Through browser settings. Here we should recall Yandex.Bar.
- Through statistics systems (Google Analytics, Yandex.Metrika, LiveInternet).
- Yandex and Google mail services. A user logged into his account on Gmail or Yandex.Mail allows robots to record his history of visiting sites, and in return he is provided with individual search results based on his own preferences.
Pay attention to the "have you visited this page before" mark next to your favorite sites in Google's SERPs.
A similar situation is with Yandex - a link to a previously visited resource is marked in purple.
At the same time, machines take into account not only the viewing depth and the length of stay on the site, but also many other factors. For a one-page resource, the main indicator will be the time spent on the site, and not the number of visited sections :) In other cases, the minimum acceptable index of the depth of views is 3 (of course, the more the better). In other words, on average, in addition to the landing page, users follow 2 more links on the site.
In recent years, the importance of behavioral factors for ranking systems has increased markedly, and no wonder. What could be more objective than the impressions of real users? Robots draw conclusions based on observations of the actions of the widest audience, so the assessment of the quality of the site is as close to objective as possible. Yandex, for greater fidelity, also uses Matrixnet technology, in which real users manually check sites for “lice”. An approach of this kind eliminates attempts to artificially inflate positive indicators of behavioral factors on the site.
Website promotion systems by behavioral factors
Behavioral factors at the moment are not so much a fashionable feature as an urgent need. It is quite logical and predictable the emergence of automated tools and systems that offer promotion in the top 10 for queries due to behavioral factors .
Their essence is simple: real users perform certain tasks (read - actions). They find the specified site for the specified request within the TOP-50 search results, follow the link and act as an interested user (visit a couple of sections of the site, carefully “read” the texts, add goods to the basket, and so on). In order to confuse the search engine, performers even browse competitor sites, search for related queries, then enter the exact query and, of course, view several pages of the site being promoted. When performing the task, browsers of various popularity are used. The completed order is supported by a report with screenshots.
Systems offer:
- automatic execution of the task by a special program, without human intervention;
- manual execution of the task.
Risks of cheating website behavioral factors
The description of these systems sounds tempting, but the sudden increase in attention to the resource from the backyard of search results often causes unflattering suspicions of robots. No one is immune from the fact that tasks can be performed by the same users, respectively, their accounts, IP addresses, and activity history are controlled by search engines. In this case, the increase in the position of the site can not be expected.
It is paradoxical that after the announcement-warning from Yandex that the cheating of behavioral factors harms sites (the first link in the search results for the query of the same name), these services have become even more popular.
To some extent, emulation of search traffic can be justified for recently born web resources, but only with a very careful and competent approach. The results of promotion by behavioral factors with the help of special systems are very ambiguous. According to online reviews, on average, the state of the site does not change, for some requests the situation in the search results improves from +10 to +30 positions, some requests worsen their positions.
The main thing
Behavioral factors are not a panacea.
It is impossible to achieve high positions in the ranking of the site, ignoring the rest of the optimization requirements. Only the constant development of the resource in many ways will help create a high-quality, interesting, highly visited site.