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Old 10-23-2007, 02:34 PM
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espmartin espmartin is offline
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Default Re: Does click-through rate affect your search engine positions?

While click-through rates do lead to daily swings in your SERPs, and it is a fact that
manipulation can and does occur (black hat style) in click ratios for many sites, I would like
to note the importance of website accessibility in regards to click-through - and how it
comes into play with SERPs.

The new feature Google has implemented in it's tools area, sitelinks, according to their own
documentation:
Quote:
...If your site's structure doesn't allow our algorithms to find good sitelinks, or we don't think that the sitelinks are relevant to the user's query, we won't show them...
Note the first part of their statement. "If your site's structure doesn't allow..." My point is
that if you do not use semantically correct markup, which is the first part of accessifying a
website, not only will you have an UN-optimized UI (and cost you money. Have you been
following the Target.com lawsuit?), but your site will also suffer - even if it's the slightest
bit - with the ease of a SE (Google used here as an example) to crawl and gain all the
information it typically uses to "rank" you.

Hope I didn't deviate too much, but I feel that accessibility is a valuable issue in regards
to SEO. I think the worlds of semantic HTML (which is the foundation for accessibility in
my eyes) and SEO are closer related than most people think. Just think of all the click-through
you'll get with an accessible web design...
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