I read recently that Google Page Rank (relevancy) may have a great deal to do with how long a visitor stays on your site, among other factors, but this one may be heavily weighed.

In an article by Todd Freisen, director of seo at Range Online Media (RangeOnlineMedia.com) in OMMA (The Magazine of Online Media, Marketing and Advertsing) he states that, “If the Google wizards can track the duration between an initial click and the moment the user hits the back button, then it’s possible for them to identify sites that users, upon discovery, perceive as worthless and want to escape. If that’s the case, it’s plausible that Google might use this information to determine a web site’s relevancy.”

Makes sense to me, and it also makes a lot of ‘mass produced” PLR and other ‘article’ sites created with poorly written content ‘un-sticky’ and get a poor ranking in Google.

Let’s take this as an example. You do a search on Google. You get a set of results. You click on one result, lets call it SiteX, and you don’t like what you see and immediately (within seconds) use your “Back” button to go back to the results you got in Google.

Google, tracking all this says, “Hmmm…. that site didn’t meet their expectations or it wasn’t relevant to their search because they hit their back button within 1.3 seconds of clicking that link… it must not be a good match for that search phrase.”

You select another result, we’ll call it SiteA. You click through to SiteA and find something that is highly relevant to your search and you stay for several minutes reading. Maybe you never click the ‘Back’ button to get more results.

For the search phrase the user entered into Google, which site do you think got a higher ‘relevancy’ ranking from Google? Which one just got a boost to their Page Rank?

SiteA, of course.

I mentioned some time ago that PLR sites are great for one thing: Keyword articles and BULK content. What you don’t want to do is use them without modification… you MUST edit them and you must edit the templates given to you too.

Keyword ‘farm’ pages may get Google to list them high in the search results in the first few days, weeks or even months but if you’re not creating relevant, sticky, and well written content users will hit their “Back” button faster than you can say ‘Google’ and eventually (probably after the next Google update) will be no where to be found in the first page’s listings for your search term.

Something every good marketer online needs to consider with a degree of seriousness.