Is it true that quickly closing a webpage opened from a search engine result can hurt the site's ranking?
- by Austin ''Danger'' Powers
My web designer recently told me that I need to be careful not to Google for my business' website, click on its search result link, then quickly close the page (or click back) too many times.
He says "Google knows" that I didn't stay on the page, and could penalize my site for having a high click-through rate if it happens too much (it was something along those lines- I forget the exact wording).
Apparently, it could look like the behavior of a visitor who was not interested in what they found (hence the alleged detrimental effect on the site's search ranking).
This sounds hard to believe to me because I would not have thought any information is transmitted which tells Google (or anyone, for that matter) whether or not a website is still open in a browser (in my case Firefox v25.0).
Could there possibly be any truth to this?
If not, why might he have come to this conclusion? Is there some click-tracking or similar technology employed by search engines which does something similar?
Looking forward to hearing everyone's thoughts.
