Google’s John Mueller has clarified that a user behavior known as pogo-sticking is not a ranking signal in search results.
“Pogo-sticking” refers to the action of quickly navigating back and forth between pages in search results. Site owners might worry that this behavior indicates a negative ranking signal when users swiftly leave a page shortly after visiting it.
Mueller has confirmed that this is not the case. In fact, pogo-sticking isn’t something to be concerned about. This topic arose during a recent Google Webmaster Central hangout, where a user posed this question:
“If we’ve got some legacy content, or content that maybe we’ve neglected and could be focusing our efforts elsewhere, and the user clicks on that, has a poor experience, and clicks back to the SERP. That’s obviously bad for SEO. Is that something that would affect that page only, or would it have an effect on the rest of the website?”
Contrary to what the site owner assumed, Mueller stated that Google doesn’t consider signals like that when it comes to search. There are various reasons why users might navigate back and forth between pages in search results, which would make it challenging for Google to use this behavior as a ranking factor.
In short, Mueller advises site owners not to focus on this. The full question, along with Mueller’s response, can be seen in the video starting at the 51:18 mark.
Mueller stated: “We try not to use signals like that when it comes to search. So there are lots of reasons why users might go back and forth, or look at different things in the search results, or stay briefly on a page and move back again. I think that’s really hard to refine and say ‘well, we could turn this into a ranking factor.’
So I would not worry about things like that. When we look at our algorithms overall, when we review which algorithm changes we want to launch, we do look at how users react to these changes. But that’s something we examine across millions of different queries and pages, to see generally if the algorithm is heading in the right direction or not.
But for individual pages, I don’t think that’s something worth focusing on at all.”
