Does more high traffic to your website increase your rankings?

[ibex]

If so than why? How? Thanks for all of your brilliant answers in advance!

[SimonCullum]

Hi Jake,

It is believed that metrics including visitor/traffic numbers, click through rates, bounce rates etc are amongst the 200+ ranking factors that Google in particular use in their natural search algorithm.

They are used because it helps to rank pages based on merit to 'return the most relevant search results based upon the users query'.

Check out the 2011 Ranking Factors here on SEOmoz for more details.

Hope that helps,

Regards

Simon

[TommySwanson52]

While it might be a ranking factor, I'd argue that its value is very minimal. While traffic might suggest that a site is popular, that can be easily manipulated. Metrics that Simon mentioned like CTR, bounce rate, and even page speed are much more relevant factors as they give a good indication to Google about the quality of the website, and how relevant it is to the query.

[AlanMosley]

Simon and Tommy make good points, i would like to add, Bing will allow you to put a page directly into their index without going though the normal processes using BWMT, but they will keep an eye on its sucess and will boot it back out again if its not like by users, meaning they retured soon to Bing to keep searching.

[Dekoda_Jones]

More important than traffic volumne is what users do on the site and the build of that site.  In recent times some of the metrics shown to have affect are: bounce rate, site speed and user engagement.