Here’s one I wrote Feb. 1, 2004:
In my previous entry and comment I mentioned that I seemed to have settled at 80, but then “ESL go” went to 78 for the search term ESL on Google. Now, I’ve gone to 69. Now maybe the google dance hadn’t really finished and it’s still winding down, or maybe the time visitors spend on a site is really important in Google’s formula for determining rankings.
I read somewhere that if you click on a web site after doing a search, the engine monitors to see if you come back to the search results. If you do, then the site you clicked on didn’t have the information you needed; it was a bad search result. If you don’t come back, then you must have found what you were looking for; it’s a good search result. I wonder if I moved up 12 spaces by clicking on my domain (I only did it 3 or 4 times) and not going back to the listings? Probably not; seems too good to be true. But I think clicking and not going back to the listings can certainly help.
4+ years later and I don’t think I’ve learned much about this since then. I’m guessing that since it’s fairly easy to manipulate search engines will either not consider this or give it very little weight. I know it has been many years since I did a search, clicked on my site, and then waited for an update…
If you were evil and had way too much time, you could click on sites belonging to people you don’t like and then hit the back button to return to the search results… Not that you’d be having a huge impact…