Is social feedback affecting your search ranking?
Can data you supply with your mouse clicks affect SERPS?
I read an interesting concept recently by SEO/SEM guru Aaron Wall about how Search Engines could make use of (and may already be making use of) social feedback supplied by users as they click through certain search results within SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages).
For example - say one of those highly annoying shopping directory sites that takes your search phrase and dynamically uses it within its own listing, even if you were searching for something unrelated to shopping, consistently ranks in the top 5 results for a particular search phrase. If very few people actually click the result because they know from past experience that “pricecheckingexpert.com” is a complete waste of time, this data can be added to the ranking mix and would force the offending site down the rankings.
Given the fact that removing or de-ranking such nuisance/noise/spam sites (whatever you want to call them) from SEPRS is high on the agendas of the top 3 search engines, it would hardly be a suprise if this data is already being used to infuence rank.
Its probably something that should be welcomed by the shopping directories like kelkoo, pricerunner and shopping.com because as long as they are supplying a useful service, people will click and they wouldn’t be de-ranked.
Social voting
Its a kind of mass social voting and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t produce accurate results, after all who better than the users to judge which sites should be de-ranked. Its also one thing that scammers and black hatters would do very well to cheat.
Syndication
