More threads by Travis Van Slooten

We're not local to Colorado. In this case, the clickers are from all over the place. Google will be able to tell from our IPs.

Still, it'll be interesting to see what happens.

Great minds think alike. I've been thinking that will def skew this test.

Seems we have several users from Edmonton and not sure how many of Darren's team works right there in that area.

Darren should find a good low ranking, not-much-going-on listing right in Edmonton. Then those that are local or at least nearby should click. And to be sure Darren does not have everyone clicking from same IP, should have folks click from home after work.
 
So, it was my post that got this all started...

I am really interested to see what, if anything, happens as a result of Darren's test. I have also completed the requested tasks.

If anyone has questions about what I experienced, I'd be happy to try to provide more information, to the greatest extent I can, without compromising my client's confidentiality, of course. I am very interested to know if others have had similar experiences.

It is really a huge problem for small businesses. It puts them in a terrible position where they want to play by the rules, but are dying out there and competing against companies that are often not always as ethical in their practices.

Challenging times, to be sure!
 
Welcome Julie! The woman that started all this! :p

Thanks for sharing your experience in the original post and for joining us and weighing in.

Yep, fun times!
 
Interesting reading and look forward to the results. I haven't clicked as I think I really would mess you up from over here :)
 
Travis,

That's a really interesting test, and I agree with Linda that CTR and bounce rate are important factor, nevertheless after reading the article, it really appears to me that this G employee was somewhat confused.

"other businesses are deemed more relevant because they have been clicked on more" could hardly be the sole reason for lagging behind in the pack. The vicious circle of not being able to rank in the leading positions due to scarce clicks, and not being able to get those click because you are not ranking well, sounds kind of creepy.

I love the "a map should be a map" comment - good thing to keep in mind:)
a map should be a map"
 
Well, It's been a week and I'm not seeing any movement in those rankings. I think that there are a number of possibilities here:


  1. Maybe the number of clicks isn't much of a factor.
  2. Maybe the clicks need to come from IPs in Denver to count.
  3. Maybe it can't work if there is a spike of activity and then the clicks go back to their regular quantities. Perhaps Google needs the increased activity to be sustained over a longer period of time before it can have an impact on rankings. This would make sense to prevent this from being gamed.
  4. Maybe it just takes longer than a week for the click activity to sync with the algorithm and their rankings will increase sometime later.

My guess is that it's either #3 or #1.
 
Whoa! When I was coming to share a related article and thought I'd check their ranking.

I really didn't think the test Darren started would move the needle, since consultants from all over the country were clicking - some from overseas too.

But lo and behold they just moved from F in the pack to B! I'll be darned!

I've checked a few times and they had not moved so thing the bump is pretty recent.
We started clicking on 5/23 so that's about right for re-indexing time.

Highland Painters.jpg

Now granted the algo could have changed or they could have done something on their end, but... interesting!

Actually don't think it was an algo change, because I just compared this screen shot with the ranking shot I took in post #13 and every single listing is in the exact same order, except for theirs moving up. Glad I thought to take that screen shot.

Wish I had thought to take a pic of their listing and home page to see if anything changed there. Darren or anyone, do you remember if their listing was claimed before? I was kinda thinking it wasn't, but I don't remember for sure.

ANYWAY here is the related post I was coming to share.

<a href="http://searchengineland.com/10-tricks-increase-clickthrough-rate-193687">9 Tricks For Local Businesses To Increase Their SERP Click-Through Rate</a>

Highland Painters.jpg
 
Whoa! I have them in position A in an incognito browser.

I checked their homepage and yeah, it looks like nothing has changed at all.

This is pretty crazy!
 

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