For the last few years, some Search Engine Optimizers have claimed that one part of the ranking algorithm(s) is simply the percentage of people who click on the results. This was never known to be true in the public eye, and still isn’t…like everything in the closely-guarded algorithm that’s likely dozens of pages long if printed in 12pt font. 
However, there are two factors that have made me revisit this concept lately, along with one that I’ve personally witnessed many times in the past:
1) Google Webmaster Tools includes Clickthrough data on keywords your site is ranked for.
2) They just released an update to Google Search Appliance called “Self-Learning Scorer“, which “…learns from employees’ searches to tune itself and improve over time. If employees repeatedly choose, say, the fourth result for a given query the GSA will learn that’s probably the most relevant one and bring it up to the top the next time the query is searched for. Over time, the GSA auto-tunes, serving up better and better internal search results without any extra administrative work.”
3) [Disclaimer: This is the part that is merely conjecture, based on things I've witnessed] Over the years of building my own Web sites, working with partners, and helping clients, I’ve noticed a Snowball Effect on rankings. There have been quite a few cases in which rankings were stagnant on the 2nd page of the results, but after attracting more quality backlinks, we were able to break onto the 1st page. The interesting part is that in many of those cases, without further effort (or very little), the rankings quickly climbed up to the top 5 or top 3, even though the pages they’re beating out were much more formidable foes than that of their 2nd-page counterparts!
What I’m saying here is that I personally believe that Google takes the percentage of people who click on a result into consideration for sorting rankings.
This makes perfect sense, considering they already compile and present the data to webmasters, and in doing so, they are increasing the relevancy of the Search results…their primary goal, with little ongoing effort. It’s like Crowdsourcing their ranking adjustments. Notice I say adjustments. This is because most users tend to stick on the 1st page, and only occasionally moves to the 2nd page.
Therefore, it’s as if the rankings can be fine-tuned by the masses, after Google has presented those truly armed for battle.
Whether this is completely accurate at this point or not, it only makes sense that the Search Engines will move in this direction in the near-future.
So what should we do about it? Learn to write fantastic Title tags and Meta Descriptions so users are attracted to our listings, which will in turn create a snowball effect and increase rankings and traffic even more!
Any thoughts? Disagree? Ideas for this concept? Leave a comment below:
