The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

As reported on Search Engine Land, Google recently enhanced their Webmaster Tools. Google is now disclosing organic click-through rates (CTRs) for top keywords in various positions directly in Webmaster Tools.

This new addition to the Webmaster Tool has some search-engine optimization (SEO) pros wondering if CTR is a factor in organic listings, despite the fact that many top SEO experts, including Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz.org, have stated that CTR cannot play a role in rankings, because they would be susceptible to gaming by click-bots or Mechanical “Turkers”.

The speculators’ and experts’ points of view both make sense. CTR is generally a signal towards relevancy – especially in the AdWords space — and Google might choose to use it on the organic side. However, it is hard to ignore the fact that if this became public knowledge, then rankings would be far too susceptible to click-fraud.

Greg Shaughnessy, President at SeaGreen Marketing posted a topic on Webmaster World’s forums with compelling data suggesting that his rankings may have been altered as recently as April 22nd, 2010 because of lower CTRs. This is a small data set, and, admittedly, it is not statistically relevant. Nonetheless, the correlation between CTR and organic rankings cannot go ignored.

"I have been in the industry for 10 years and was left unable to explain a sudden drop in Google ranking for a variety of top terms until digging into the click through today. I am confident Google is factoring CTR in its current search engine results for parts of its index.  I realize this is a small data set, but the evidence is strong. I would not be surprised if others in the community see a similar correlation between low CTR and a drop in ranking now, or in the near future." - Greg Shaughnessy

I’m not suggesting that this is proof positive that CTR is considered a factor in SEO, but the data points represented above are interesting. I’m curious to see if any other fellow Clickable community members have experienced a significant change in rankings, either positive or negative, over the last few days.

Tony Soric, Clickable SEM Guru

Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. "Clickable Gurus" participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.

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