Be Careful Checking Your Search Engine Rankings!

Today’s blog post is all about why it’s very, very important that you don’t check your rankings in google for your website. If you do, then it could actually hurt your rankings.

To explain, there have been some changes to the search engines over the last few months and a couple of those changes involve the bounce rate (how fast a visitor leaves your site) and user feedback.

Ranking highly in google is not only about how many keywords you have on the page anymore or how strong your meta tags are. It’s becoming more and more about how visitors interact with your website.

Let’s look at an example.

Let’s say you’re ranked in the 5th position on page one in google for your keyword of “window cleaning boca raton”. Let’s say that you’re excited about this (certainly understandable), so you check the rankings every day hoping you’ll go up the rankings even more.

So you type “window cleaning boca raton” (w/o the quotes) in the google search box and click search. You see where your site is and you then close the window. You do this a half a dozen times per week.

What you’re actually doing is sending the message to Google that a half dozen times per week NO sites ranking on page 1 for that keyword were enticing enough for you. You didn’t click any of them, did you? Right, so that’s exactly what you told Google. You’re basically telling Google that none of the sites – yours included – should be ranked there because the results didn’t match what you needed.

This will harm your rankings. If you check your rankings just to see what position you’re in and then click away, you could realistically cause your search engine ranking to be lowered. Not good.

Another gauge that google is using to determine rankings is the bounce rate. To put it simply how long does someone stay on your site? At what rate do they click the “back” button? How do they leave your website? Via a link you shared with them, or another way?

Generally, the longer they stay the better… the deeper into your site they get (the number of pages) the better, and if they leave (via a link) following something you’ve recommended, that’s even better.

So let’s say you’re searching for your keyword to check out your ranking as mentioned earlier, but instead of clicking away as talked about above, you do click through into your site. Maybe you want to see if it loads good, whether it’s still there, or maybe you’re just proud of it and want to look at it real quick so you can pat yourself on the back.

So you enter your site, check it out for a couple of seconds and then click the back button. That simple act has told google that the site you just visited didn’t have the information you needed. So that’s why you clicked away so fast. So the bounce rate has been adjusted downward which once again can affect your rankings in a negative way.

Let’s look at one more possible scenario where you need to be careful.

Let’s say you search for your keyword of “window cleaning boca raton” and see your site in the rankings, but this time you want to check out a website ranked higher than yours. So you enter that site. You click around and you check it out thoroughly. You spend 10 minutes on that site.

Guess what you’ve just done? That’s right. You just told google that that site is a valuable site. You stayed on the site for a long time which means to google that that result is exactly what you were looking for when you searched for it. In other words, you just helped your competitor!!

Before ending this blog post, I’m going to explain to you what google wants in their search results. But first it’s important to understand that no one knows for sure exactly how google ranks websites. The best search engine optimizers in the world can’t say with 100% certainty what the google search engine algorithms consist of.

However, it’s common knowledge that google wants quality results in their index. They don’t want junk sites. They don’t want sites with minimal content. They don’t want duplicate content. They don’t want “made for adsense” sites. They don’t want thin affiliate sites. What they want are websites in their results that consist of high quality content that visitors will spend time reading and interacting with. That is the bottom line.

Also know that google could care less about you as a website owner. All they care about is providing the best results to searchers. Without searchers finding what they’re looking for, then google would go out of business literally. It might not happen tomorrow, next week, or next year, but if enough searchers are dissatisfied with the results they find in google and start using other search engines, then google would be in trouble. They make billions primarily from those little ads you see on the search results pages, so they will do everything they can to keep searchers using their search engine. And this means that quality websites/content with good bounce rates and high user interaction get rewarded with higher rankings. It’s that simple.

So if you have a website or are thinking about getting one going, keep the above in mind.

I’ll finish up by repeating this in caps because it’s so important:
STOP SEARCHING YOUR OWN KEYWORDS. STOP CLICKING YOUR OWN SEARCH LISTINGS!

So you might be asking yourself the question “ok steve if i can’t check my own rankings, how do i know where I’m ranked?” There are a number of free rank checking tools out there, but the one I recommend is called Rank Checker. It’s a firefox add on, so you do need to use the firefox internet browser in order to use it.

You can find Rank Checker at http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/ It’s totally free. You do need to insert an email address and choose a password, but they rarely send you emails. So go ahead and get it, download it, and you’re good to go. Once downloaded and you’ve restarted firefox, you’ll see a small icon at the bottom. It looks like this:

You can click on this little icon to open up a window and search for keywords either individually or a group (ie: search for 20 different keywords at the same time). And you can do this all day long if you want to because it won’t affect your search engine rankings in any way, shape, or form.

Hope the above helps. Have a great day!

Regards,

Steve