What effect does previous page visits have in SERP?

[10JQKAs]

We've all seen it before, right before a result, you see "You visited this page on ____"

What effect does a single visit have? Multiple visits?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Really interesting question about user engagement metrics that we don't have a clear answer to, but we've received hints from the engines that they track this sort of thing through toolbars, logged in searches and other methods.

Bill Slawski recently wrote a post on a Google patent that would adjust rankings on exactly this type of behavior. Quoting directly from the his article, the patent described user signals such as:

• The percentage of searches in which the user selected the first result (or one of the top results) in the list of search results
• The average first click position (i.e., the numerical position within the list of results)
• The percentage of searches that had long clicks (i.e., the percentage of times that a user selects a link to go to a result page and stays on that page for a long time, such as more than 3 minutes)
• The percentage of searches that did not have another search within a short period of time
• The percentage of searches that did not have a reformulated search (i.e., a search where one or more search terms in the original search are added, deleted, or changed) within a short period of time
• A combination of different metrics, and/or the like

So a single click, in the ocean of web results, probably will never make a large difference. Or even multiple visits by a single user.

But if you have a large number of users click on a result, and then click the back button to choose another search result - this is almost definitely going to have impact on rankings. Or, another example, if a large number of searchers consistently choose the URL in the 3rd position of a given SERP - and staying on that site - that particular domain might have a good chance of rising.

This past April, Google announced "we are beginning to incorporate data about the sites that users block into our algorithms." Again, a single person blocking a site from their search results probably isn't going to have an impact, but a large number of such actions probably will.

Engagement metrics are becoming increasing important, but all indications are they must be taken in aggregate.