One of the many myths concerning how pages are ranked is that the volume of traffic a website receives affects the rankings of the pages within that website. On the surface this seems logical as a website that gets a lot of traffic probably has good content. Unfortunately once given a deeper look at the different software being used, then it all starts to fall apart.

Here’s why search engines don’t use a web site’s traffic in their ranking algorithms:

1. Search engines don’t know how much traffic a website or web page getsThis is probably the most significant flaw in this theory. For Google, or any search engine, to use your pages’/site’s traffic as a ranking factor they need to know how much traffic your pages/site gets. The simple matter of fact is they don’t know this nor they can find it out the vast majority of the time. They don’t have access to your site stats or Apache logs and they certainly aren’t psychic (although I am sure they wish they were).Now let me debunk some very specific points that many like to claim:
   1. Google can use Google Analytics. At first glance this one has some merit to it. After all, Google Analytics is logging and reporting software and would tell Google everything they would need to know about a page’s/site’s traffic. The problem with this is that you have to be using Google Analytics for them to be able to access this data. The overwhelmingly vast majority of websites do not. Without a large sample of data to work with this data is useless for the purpose of ranking web pages. Also, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask do not have access to Google Analytics Data and do not have a comparable service to use.
   2. They can use Alexa data. Alexa claims to rank websites based on their popularity. What they really do is rank websites based on the traffic of their incredibly biased user-base. It’s no surprise to anyone that Alexa’s data is obviously very inaccurate and skewed towards webmasters since they are the ones most likely to be using their toolbar. They are accurate for the top few thousand sites or so but after that they get more and more inaccurate and useless. They also only count traffic per website and not per page. Since search engines rank web pages and not entire websites this makes the data even less valuable.
   3. They can track click throughs in the SERPs. This doesn’t work for a variety of reasons. Firstly, it is a self fulfilling prophecy (see below). Secondly, it’s way too easily to manipulate (see below again), and lastly, it’s already been proven to be a poor ranking technique. Anyone remember Direct Hit? This was a means they used to rank page in their SERPs. They were dead before most webmasters even knew what PageRank was.
2. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy. The reason why webmasters strive so hard to rank well in Google and other search engines is the potentially vast amount of traffic their sites may receive from those search engines. We also know that the higher your pages rank the more traffic they will receive (e.g. the first listing in the SERPs will receive more traffic the second result which will receive more traffic then the third result, etc). This pretty much means that the sites that already rank well have an unfair advantage as they will already receive more traffic then their lower ranking competition. How can a lower ranking page ever hope to catch the higher rankings pages if the traffic the higher rankings pages receive from their rankings will always be higher then theirs? Browse around these guys.
3. Traffic volume can be manipulated too easily. It doesn’t take much of an imagination to figure out how to artificially increase a page’s traffic. Whether it is amateur webmasters hitting the refresh button on their browser, more advanced webmasters buying expired domains with traffic and redirect them to their website, or large spam syndicates writing advanced scripts and bots to crawl their pages, artificially inflating traffic is very simple to do.
4. Traffic is not an indicator of quality contentTake a website with average traffic and average content and spend thousands of dollars promoting it. It can be a PPC campaign, magazine ad, banner campaign. It doesn’t really matter. The end result will be a significant increase in traffic to the website, particularly to the website’s home page. The content is still average, though. The volume of traffic a site receives is not necessarily an indicator of the quality of its content. It usually is an indicator of the quality of marketing by the site owner. Speaking of marketing checkout this awesome offer for gatorboard printing from Printmoz!