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]

Originally Posted by 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.

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...