Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Does CTR Affect Ranking & Authority? Can PPC Influence That Too?
-
Hi everyone,
Good CTR and bounce rate seem to affect rankings positively, but what about domain authority? Is that something built entirely on links and semantics, or does CTR play a factor too?
Consider a homepage ranking for its brand name. Switching off any brand PPC will increase the natural listing's CTR. Would that have a positive SEO impact on the homepage/domain?
-
Hi there,
Since Domain Authority is a Moz metric, it is not affected by CTR due to Moz not being able to determine or collect this sort of data.
As far as CTR and PPC influencing search rankings goes, there are good reasons why Google would not rely on either metric too intently. For one, it would be very easy to mimic a very bad bounce rate on a competitor's site: set bots to click on search results to a competitor website, click straight out.
It would be a big conflict of interest for PPC to influence SEO either positively or negatively, and although none of us are naive enough to believe that Google always does everything with the best of intentions, they would be in a world of trouble if this type of behaviour were proven.
CTR and bounce rate are so easily influenced / manipulated by factors outside of quality, authority and relevancy that I assume their influence on rankings is quite low. Sure, this data is valuable to Google, but it won't be a signal that has a huge amount of relevance.
-
As Martijn said, I can't see that DA would be affected by CTR. This is more likely affected by links and how Google perceives you as an authority site. I am sure there will be lots of other factors that play a part in this also.
-Andy
-
Hi boux,
At the moment Google is probably incorporating the CTR in some way to calculate the rankings. They know from the period of time between visiting SERPs how much time you\v'e spend on a page. I however doubt that they will use it to calculate the domain authority. As for some pages it won't say a thing that you've only been to a page for 30 seconds. To be fair I don't think you'll ever be able to calculate the impact of switching off your PPC brand listings to see as positive impact on SEO.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does DA/PA have any effect on rankings?
I have seen many people are concerned about increasing DA and PA of their websites. While I am very curious why do people focus on increasing DA and PA? Does DA and PA effect the rankings of the website? Because I have recently launched my website regarding men beard trimmer and it is ranking on 1st page but not on number 1 position. Will increasing DA/PA of the site help me in occupying 1st position?
On-Page Optimization | | RyanAmin0 -
Can I put the company name in the image alt text instead of just the service type im trying to rank for?
Hello, if I am trying to rank for a service type and the exact phrase is in the companies name, can I put the company name in the image alt text instead of just the service type? Seizing the opportunity to get another mention of the businesses name...two birds with the one stone if you will... For example, "lawn cutting" being the service type but the company's name is Paul's lawn cutting. Could i put Pauls Lawn Cutting in the image alt text, or just stick to lawn cutting? Thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | Gavinn0 -
How to change images of a page without loosing ranking?
Hi, I have two reasons to change some images of a page on a wordpress site: 1.Google speed service advise me to optmize the images size to better spead load times. 2.I want to change images titles (to improve seo optimization for the page keyword), so i need to replace them, since im using wordpress. Now the question is: Can i just change the images without worring about any related seo issues? Or should i follow some best practice to change images in order to not affect the ranking of the page? tx for your support!
On-Page Optimization | | Dreamrealemedia0 -
Does Rel=canonical affect google shopping feed?
I have a client who gets a good portion of their sales (~40%) from Google Product Feeds, and for those they want each (Product X Quantity) to have it’s own SKU, as they often get 3 listings in a given Google shopping query, i.e. 2,4,8 units of a given product. However, we are worried about this creating duplicate content on the search side. Do you know if we could rel=canonical on the site without messing with their google shopping results? The crux of the issue is that they want the products to appear distinct for the product feed, and unified for the web so as not to dilute. Thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | VISISEEKINC0 -
ECommerce Filtering Affect on SEO
I'm building an eCommerce website which has an advanced filter on the left hand side of the category pages. It allows users to tick boxes for colours, sizes, materials, and so on. When they've made their choices they submit (this will likely be an AJAX thing in a future release, but isn't at time of writing). The new filtered page has a new URL, which is made up of the IDs of the filter's they've ticked - it's a bit like /department/2/17-7-4/10/ My concern is that the filtered pages are, on the most part, going to be the same as the parent. Which may lead to duplicate content. My other concern is that these two URLs would lead to the exact same page (although the system would never generate the 'wrong' URL) /department/2/17-7-4/10/ /department/2/**10/**17-7-4/ But I can't think of a way of canonicalising that automatically. Tricky. So the meat of the question is this: should I worry about this causing issues with the SEO - or can I have trust in Google to work it out?
On-Page Optimization | | AndieF0 -
Bold & Italics Best Practice?
Hi All, Does anyone know the official best practice use of bold and italic fonts? If I have a long page of text- 800 words + I usually bold a few sentences to allow the user to be able to read only the bold on the page, and still make sense of the article. By reading all the bold it will kind of make sense and the user gets the point of the article. This wasn't really done for SEO purposes, but so the reader gets to the bottom of the page in a reasonable amount of time, and gets all the key points and facts of the article. I was advised not to do this and to just bold/italic the keyword/phrases the article was written to rank for. I would like to know anyone else's opinion/strategy on using bold/italics effectively and within best practices. What's the official word? Thank you for your help. Ian
On-Page Optimization | | cookie7770 -
I have two pages ranking for the same keyword.
The index page and the targeted landing page for that keyword. They have different content, title, meta but I am competing with myself for the main keyword in the industry. What is the best way to fix this? 301 the keyword page to the index page?
On-Page Optimization | | Aftermath_SEO0 -
Transferring authority from one domain to another
My dilemma For example: If I have a website ranking at number 11 for (Keyword) and there is a site named www.(Keyword).com ranking at number 12 for (Keyword), if I were to buy this site and redirect to my own site, would this be at all beneficial? Any advice would be much appreciated!
On-Page Optimization | | CMoore850
