Does CTR affect rankings in Google?

[tb987]

Google uses technology in Adwords to rank based on ctr. they have tracking urls in the natural search results, so it wouldn't take much to do the same in the these results. They certainly seem to do this when you log into Google and do a search - they know what sites you have visited and ranking are different to the ones resturned when you are not logged on. So does CTR affect rankings for a given term? Not sure how you would go about testing this.

[temi]

The simple answer is yes, CTR does affect your ranking, if a page that is highly ranked gets very high bounce rate, it will lose it high ranking as google will assume the information the site/page is serving is visitors is now relevant or poor quality.

[tb987]

Interesting answer and a bit frightening. Bounce rate would suggest that they are using either using Google analytics data and/or how quickly visitors hit the back button; or even worse cross site tracking using double click? Big brother is watching you.

[seo_india]

The simple answer is yes, CTR does affect your ranking, if a page that is highly ranked gets very high bounce rate, it will lose it high ranking as google will assume the information the site/page is serving is visitors is now relevant or poor quality.

Surely CTR could be tracked by Google. I think I am planning to remove Google analytic script from my website.

I do get spooky feeling of being watched sometimes

[remoradea]

They got a complex algorithm, why not use this information...

[andyjpn]

Expanding on this:

I think much of what applies to quality evaluation of Adwords landing pages will apply to the evaluation of any website.

Sites that rank highly in organic search results for competitive terms that are expensive in Adwords must surely get reviewed by humans to ensure that their quality merits their high ranking?

CTR is easy for them to track, so I am sure they would take it into account.

As regards bounce rate:

Now they have plenty of ways to track people's movements including PR-checking browser plugins, Adsense, Analytics, gadgets etc.

[OldWelshGuy]

There is no conclusive proof, but understanding search engines as I do, I can't see any way they are NOT using all their available data to influence the SERPs. They will simply remove the spam noise from their stats and filter in what is left.

[johnafrankllin]

How can a search engine track the bounce rate if a website is not using its statistics software. A search engine can track no of hits on a particular result, but it will affect SERP of that result page is not yet cleared by any of the search engine. There is no any clear answer of this question but, I can say it do not affect ranking.

Regards
John

[surreypcsupport]

How can a search engine track the bounce rate if a website is not using its statistics software.

If a user searches using Google and then clicks through to a site google will see that clickthru. If that same IP/user then requests another set of results within say 5 seconds then Google could interpret that as a bounce if they wanted to.

[dsouza]

CTR very much matters in terms of serp result.