Page 7 - Experiment to test user behavior – please participate

It went up to no.5 ... When we started few days ago, it was no. 11 by me, now it is no.5. IMO, this is a significant jump and can be assumed as a proof.

We should try to put it higher and then do the reverse... at one point we should start to search for the phrase but click on other results. If the ranking went down, we proved it.

have backlinks changed at all? has the site been updated at all?

I'm not convinced that we are just finding the results we were looking for rather than trying to find out what is really going on.

There have been no backlink changes according to yahoo. No updates to site.

It does appear that we are now seeing some significant movement. Keep clicking everyone. Once again I encourage anyone else that is reading please join in..

participated
And have seen on #9 with 3 backlinks reported from yahoo
I am in Greece

WOW! The site is now in fourth position in Hong Kong.

It would appear that the experiment has been a success. Google told us they were using peoples benavior to improve serp results. This experiment seems to show they were telling the truth!

A movement from position 9/10 to a postion 4 certainly shows something has happened. The rest of the sites that come up do not appear to have changed in rank order in any other way.

This certainly gives us food for thought. ie how does this knowledge help us improve serps. My guess is make your title really attractive to lure people to click on your site and than have a sticky site.

My thanks to DiffeeOnline for making this site available for experiment.

And thank you so very much to all that have participated. It is fantastic to see that we have been able to conduct a worldwide experiment via seochat. The results of this experiment have aided us in our learning and understanding of how google works.

Lets keep the clicking up for a couple more days.

Once again thank you to all.

I have done NOTHING to this site - promise. No links, no changes, I haven't even accessed the back end tools for literally months.

Went from 9 to 10 to 11 to 10 to 9 to 10 -- then BOOM, it's at 5 all of a sudden.

We definitely need to keep this up with a different site, either by trying one with G-analytics and trying to move it up faster or by trying to tank a site through click and back activities.

Whatever you guys decide, just let me know.

#4 in San Francisco

I still have it at 10 here in Europe.

One word for the case we want to continue, as you proposed, gazzahk:
We should check (or have we done it here already?) the initial position of the site for another keyword, and then see wether the clickthrough-and-stick behaviour in our test is helping only for the SERP we experiment on or for any other SERP as well.

Hi!!
i have done it.....

It's #4 in Canada at the time of this post. This is clearly interesting!

It went up to the 4th position on my DCs, too.

Gaz thanks for the idea and managing the whole experiment. When we started I thought people will not participate...but as it seems people at seochat are willing to experiment.

These kind of experiments can help SEOs who don't have enough data to test on their own sites. Maybe we could do tests like this more often.

Ok. I've done it.
Your site was 5th in goooogle.ro and 4th when I tried from goooogle.com

4th from India.

Thanks gazzahk & DifeeOnline.

The site has now moved to second place in Hong Kong. I am amazed it appears user behavior can have a very strong influence on SERPs. The question is of course open what level of increase traffic is needed to change serps. This experiment has shown it does have an effect, a quite strong effect. But this keyword was not competative.

I would think the traffic we have generated is also in some way reperesntative of natural traffic in that it has come from a range of ip adresses from all over world. Not just a few.

Still I am blown away. I did not expect to see such a strong, noticable change in serps.

post script

It is also now number four for dAifAfee foArd liAncAoln (Leave the "A" out). and number three for dAifAfee foArd (Leave the "A" out). I checked this when we first started and the site did not even appear on page 1 for these terms. So it would appear the effect is not just on the term that is searched. But at least for other combinations of that term. Quite amazing really...

#2 in India too.