SEO Black Hat, Google, and Search Engine Rankings

Posted • December 26, 2008 • Comments Off

SCASI the New SEO Term for Search Engine Rankings

A while back a had a post SEO, Search Engine Ranking, Bounce Rate and Google, this was a very interesting theory presented by SEO Black Hat that stated that Google has been using bounce rates as a determining factor in their SERPs (search engine results pages).

In the post SCASI, a further clarification of this “bounce rate”. SCASI is defined as SERP Click After Site Inspection. This is making pretty good sense. Read the quote below and see if it makes sense to you.

SCASI

I don’t think there’s a word for this yet, so I’ll invent the term SCASI (SERP Click After Site Inspection).

If a surfer Clicks SERP A from a list of SERPs and then (10 secs to 4 mins later) clicks any other SERP on that same list of search results it is a negative quality indicator. If the user found what they are looking for, they wouldn’t need to keep clicking on SERPs. If they continue to click, they’re initial find was not satisfying.

The links in search results are not direct links to the sites, but rather a google redirect such as:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=14&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.holidays.net%2Fthanksgiving%2F&ei=UQIvSfPRHaGievXK5OMK&usg=AFQjCNFNzOBQgfUn_14d33MdAMUPBgYz2Q&sig2=SJhrGbVZlvPXlOT9zYBHgQ

This would allow Google to easily track SCASI . . . and to a great extent “bounce”.

This isn’t technically the “bounce rate” but would be a good corollary in most instances. However, in the event that the landing page actually answers the users questions, the corollary would start to break down.

For example, many people who go to the wikipedia through a Google search will not continue to click in wikipedia. Many of them will “bounce” after reading the article. But if the wiki article answered the user’s question, the bounce might be high but the SCASI would be very low.

As webmasters, we don’t have access to SCASI data . . . unless of course we own all the top 10 SERPs

I think SEO Black Hat is possibly on to something here. SCASI huh?

What do you think?

Late,
Gary Pool

Comments