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04.20.06
User Behaviour And Google Site Profiles
 By
Jim Hedger
StepForth's methods of providing search engine optimization services for Google rankings have evolved significantly over the past year.
Since the release of Google's March 30, 2005 patent application, " Information retrieval based on historical data ", our SEO and research departments have made site usability and understanding user behaviours a priority.
After reading, analysing and writing about information found in the patent application, we correctly predicted user behaviours were becoming critical factors in Google's estimation of the relevancy or importance of documents in its index. To meet what we see as the major challenges for our search engine advertising clients in the coming years, we have spun off a SEO friendly web site division, moved to provide several levels of SEO consultancy, and accessed the services of website usability experts.
A growing number of others in the SEO community are sensing, testing and talking about issues central to how Google perceives user behaviours and how that perception affects search engine placements.
A discussion thread at WebMasterWorld, " Google algo moves away from links, towards traffic patterns ", has been mentioned in several SEO/SEM related news sources and blogs. Started on April 4, the thread has been picking up steam with discussion generally ranging towards Google's tracking of user behaviours and how that data might affect search results.
The term "user behaviours" describes any number of actions taken by people while using a Google branded search tool, while visiting a particular site in Google's index, and while moving from site to site or document to document.
Basically, Google wants to know what its users like and dislike. Those user-judgements have become important factors in how Google ranks sites in its index and in personalized search results shown to registered users.
Hundreds of millions of Internet users subscribe to or otherwise use Google products every day. Google tracks each of their actions to one degree or another. For some, a simple cookie feeds basic data back to Google's servers. For others, products such as the Google Toolbar, Bookmarks, News Alerts and even Google Analytics feed large amounts of online behavioural information to Google.
Google pays attention to what its users do when they visit a particular website, page or file listed in its index, keeping an active record in order to compile historic profiles of those documents. If a visitor accesses a document while performing a Google search or from a bookmark file, Google notices and takes note. If visitors find a document by following a link from another, that action (or behaviour) is noted. How long visitors tend to stay on a document is counted, as are the actions taken by those visitors after they are finished viewing the document.
It does so for a number of reasons. Search is increasingly becoming personalized. Google is experimenting with personalized search results for registered users, showing ads that match location; results from Google Base that match user locations registered with searches performed using Google Local. The goal of search is to deliver the most relevant set of results possible, and Google is trying to account for the fact that relevance is relative to the searcher's personal needs. Google also views user-behaviours as a way to filter out sites that a mass of users might deem less useful.
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