Michael Martinez :verified:<p>Despite what numerous SEO pundits are claiming, clicks do NOT influence "rankings". They are used for personalization and are analyzed offline for the further development of future algorithms and signals.</p><p>In 2012 Vanessa Fox (a former Googler) published an article on Search Engine Land titled "Is Google’s Synonym Matching Increasing?"</p><p>This article provided important insight from someone who (at the time) was well-trusted by the SEO community and a former "insider" who knew how Google worked at the time.</p><p>Here is an excerpt from her article:</p><p>SEARCHER INTENT<br>Google uses all kinds of signals to determine that you want the Beautiful Day video when you type in the letters “U2”, but certainly one strong signal is what previous searchers have wanted. Google has data on all of the millions of times searchers have looked for U2 in the past and know how many of them paired that search with (or later refined it with) “video” or “beautiful day” and also knows how often U2 searchers clicked on videos show in the search results. If Google started showing video, but searchers never clicked on those results, they might stop showing them; if every searcher clicked the video over a web page, they might start showing more video in results.</p><p>Google has many patents around this idea. Query Revision Using Known Highly Ranked Queries describes “a system and method use session-based user data to more correctly capture a user’s potential information need based on analysis of strings of queries other users have formed in the past. To accomplish this, revised queries are provided based on data collected from many individual user sessions. For example, such data may include click data, explicit user data, or hover data.”</p><p>In other words, Google can look at what previous searchers have typed, clicked on, and hovered over to determine what a particular searcher might want and incorporates those signals into what pages are ranked.</p><p><a href="https://c.im/tags/seo" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>seo</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/google" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>google</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/algorithms" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>algorithms</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/ctr" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ctr</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/rankings" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>rankings</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/searchengineoptimization" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>searchengineoptimization</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/webmarketing" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>webmarketing</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/digitalmarketing" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>digitalmarketing</span></a> </p><p><a href="https://searchengineland.com/is-googles-synonym-matching-increasing-how-searchers-and-brands-can-be-both-helped-and-hurt-131504" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">searchengineland.com/is-google</span><span class="invisible">s-synonym-matching-increasing-how-searchers-and-brands-can-be-both-helped-and-hurt-131504</span></a></p>