I've got a question for some of the more experienced out there.

These days, a lot of us use our Favorites/Bookmarks to get to the sites that we visit often. I have hundreds of bookmarks, some of which I use once a week or so. I also have over a hundred set up on my FF speeddial, that I use almost daily. Obviously, using those links can't pass any juice, but do you think the SEs' algorithms give them any consideration whatsoever, in determining site popularity or authority? Does pure traffic enter into the equation?
To me, the use of bookmarks is the same as if the URL were typed into the address bar. But if 10,000 people are typing it in, per day, it would seem reasonable to hope that the target site would derive some benefit from that traffic.

Any thoughts? Comments?

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Many of my sites are built around semantic links (favourites) collected since 1995 / 1996.

I have two types:

1. Pure exported favourites HTML documents from the file menu in my browser. These HTML pages are put in folders and disallowed in robots.txt.
2. Favourites, linked in HTML documents with content. Most of those pages have a meta nofollow tag because of a lot of noise from the SE's.
   
   More precisely:
   
   <meta name="robots" content="index, nofollow">
   
3. In addition I have about 6 pages of social bookomaks collected on deliciou.us.
4. I think my link collection / favourites are much more interesting for people than for SE's.

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If perhaps, SEs are gauging an interest and popularity factor from sites like Alexa and other traffic monitors, there is no reason to think they would discount it. On this basis, it must carry some weight. How, I cannot quantify.

Short Answer: Direct traffic is not taken into account by any search engine.

How would a search engine know about the direct traffic that a site receives? Search engines can only quantify the traffic that they send to a site through the SERPS. Even plugins such as Google Toolbar with PageRank enabled do not report whether the visit is through a link or a bookmark, and Google and Yahoo both insist the data accumulated by their analytics software are not used in any way in calculating search rankings. Even if they did, since these tools are only installed on a fraction of the world's web sites, the search engines can't accurately compare the traffic of a monitored site to an unmonitored one to use the data for ranking purposes.

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...well last year I worked with a company that did 'seo tests' and apparently if you have let's say the google toolbar plugin, when you bookmark a page it tells google that you did and according to them (the company) if thousand upon thousands of people bookmarked a site and they all had the toolbar that would increase the site's rankings...

This isn't my opinion but...

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bookmarking is widely use in link building strategies, so no wonder it could help in algo.

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After I posted the question, I thought about it a bit more, and came to the same wall... how could the SE know? Chalk it up to a senior moment.

Thanks, wige!

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Based upon wige's post, which I'm inclined to agree with 100%, I can't see how the SEs could monitor the direct traffic to a site (unless one ascribes to the Big Brother Theory, which may not be that outlandish ). So your friends were saying that it wasn't the action of following a bookmark that was tracked, but the action of bookmarking that was tracked. Interesting thought, but again, how would various SEs track that?

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Cold reality : 1, Hot air : 0.

I'm inclined to side with the idea that direct traffic carries 'very little' weight, but I cannot easily accept that it carries 'zero' weight. Setting this aside, though, it follows that traffic from serps is NEW business, while traffic from bookmarks is GOOD WILL which can't help but generate natural IBLs along the way, which will be picked up, will be calculated into the ranking, and will have a positive effect.

This is what I find the most difficult task to face: Not preaching to the converted. A site needs to be ready to appeal to the new visitor but must also be ready to fulfill the needs of the seasoned supporter and repeat visitor. Growth from the success of this mission is totally natural. It stands to reason that bookmarking, even while it misses the early calculations will produce gains in the long term.

well it's funny but i just thought of something, in a sense, and im not saying this is the case or can be the case, but i guess the bookmark is like a link. just because the bookmark isn't a link on a webpage to another website, it's still a 'quick' link that the bookmarker thought was useful and so he linked to the other site via his browser...

now have we all read the TOS for the google toolbar for instance...I haven't but is usage data being sent to google? That's the only way I can guess the information could be used, the bookmarking information that is.

The toolbar is installed in our browsers...microsoft asks us all the time if we could like to send statistical data to them...

I'm just not sure if this is happening with the google toolbar...the place i worked at claimed it was 100% true and touts it to their customers as well...I have to admit too, that since I heard that I have been bookmarking my site on every computer I can...

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morestar: I could be wrong, but my belief is that as long as you are logged into Google, all your activity is logged. That this information is used in SERP ranking is totally unknown, but plausible, just as the direct traffic is plausible, though improbable. More hot air.

If you don't want your internet browsing monitored by Google, log out when you surf.

oh yes exactly and it all leads down the path of us never really knowing the full truth of what or how whatever is used to calculate rankings - top secret...

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Now, THAT'S an interesting point, wg! I am logged into Google all the time, and I have also read that they can monitor every site you go to. As a gun-totin', whiskey swillin' Texan, I have a problem with that, but it would be nice to know for sure... both questions: Can/do they monitor all urls visited, and if/when monitored, does following a bookmark pass any benefit on to the subject url?

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Ya and I remember I read somewhere on WPW, about a month ago...someone was checking their rankings while logged in and thought they had got to the #1 spot...they were right delighted but realized they were #1 cause they were logged into the google account.

I've done that a few times now...now I either have to open a different browser or log out...

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On a slightly related note, I recently launched a new homepage, and while organic traffic was flat, saw a substantial decrease in non-referrals (ie. bookmarked or urls entered directly). The url did not change.

Any hypotheses on what may have caused this? Thanks.

Only certain information is logged by Google. When you create a bookmark in your browser, Google has no way of seeing that - the toolbar doesn't appear to report that activity. However, if you add the bookmark through the toolbar itself (which is stored on Google's servers, not locally on your computer) then Google is told about the bookmark.

Beyond that, when you are logged in to your Google account, Google will remember what you search for, and what pages you visit through the SERPs. However, that is all Google has access to. If the system can see your activity through Adsense or Analytics, it doesn't show up in the User History.

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Just add &pws=0 to the end of the url and enter.

Personally, I dont have a clue whether Google uses traffic data from toolbars or analytics to influence rankings. Bookmarks which are in the public domain are taken into account obviously, apart from the nofollow ones.

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Traffic = visits, doesn't matter where it comes from. Stat-counters will report direct, returning, site and SERP. You can't follow a direct path back to it's origin like you can a query or a site. Unless you can find an ip address.

I know that if I have your site bookmarked on my browser it's not a link. It will be recorded as returning visit/visit loyalty in traffic analysis. There's no juice passed because a browser/personal/ip has no juice to pass.

There's a lot of difference between checking link:site.com and checking Alexa. Not sure exactly, exactly, about what counts as links for all cases - and I'm glad I don't have to - I think direct traffic is good. Don't know how search engines count it. Visitor loyalty? Time on site? That's what I look at...I've started looking at bounce rate different lately for my own site - it might take someone 30 minutes to read one page - after that, I'd leave too. Hopefully they'll come back...

Well, for a question that I didn't think through very well before posting, it's at least raised some interesting points. Thanks for everyone's input!

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If a page contains an SE's analytics code, then, yes, that SE can accumulate data re. direct traffic.

One look at a Google Analytics report will suffice to demonstrate such.

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...and google can effect rankings based on that data if they wish especially if they compare search/click data to direct traffic which occurs within the browser...

if a user searchers for a site with the keywords red honda cars and clicks through to a site, bookmarks that site and re-visits the site it tells the SE that site was indeed a relevant result - so let's pump that site out so our searchers/customers get that same relevant result - until it is proven not to be a relevant result anymore.

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How, though, would that differ from Google's presently serving up individualized SERPs based on one browsing habits?

Do you mean that the habits of the universe of users is to be used as a proxy for a given individual user? If so, does that not run contrary to Google's efforts to provide increasingly personalized results?

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Google shows items that are stumbled (stumbleupon), I think its a matter of time before search engines start using the "collective vote" as part of their search algo.

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Hm, see I don't really know...right now it's all just a maybe cause no one really knows...I don't see a problem with taking the collective vote to some extent - maybe as 1 ranking factor but not the overall factor...

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One way to give users a measurable vote would be to extend the SE's range of services to include selective search from only the users bookmarked sites, and gather traffic reports from that service to include in the aggregate of WWW => geo ==> local SERP rankings.

Nice idea...maybe it's on the way!

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