Clicking on SERPs

[loopyal]

I've spoken to 2 people in the past few weeks, who have clients who search for their keywords every day, and then click on their own links, but not others, in the belief that this is good for their website ranking.

Google does track clicks with redirects, so I can understand that they would know someone searched for a term, and they clicked on a result.

I could understand if it was once per month, but doing it every day?

And if they keep coming back, to search for other keywords and click on those results too.

Looks like they would just paint a very large target on themselves.

What's your opinion?

[TomRayner]

Traffic has no impact on your SERP visibility.  It won't improve it, so doing this will have zero benefit.

In fact, it could even be hurting them (at a stretch).  What are they doing once they click through?  If they're bouncing off and not spending time on the site, that could actually hurt them.  Bounce rate, to some degree, is taken into consideration when Google ranks your site.  It would take an awful lot of bounces, but if Google sees people coming to the site and leaving quickly, it's going to start to think "this page does not serve the user".

I wouldn't worry much over clients doing it, but I always believe it's important that clients should understand the basics of SEO, so that they can appreciate your work but also for transparency's sake in the line of business.  Educating them over this (and probably personalised search, by the sounds of it) would be a start.

[loopyal]

Thanks Tom.

Yes, thats what I told them too.

Unfortunately, when someone a client trusts tells them something, it is hard to get them to stop believing it.

[KeriMorgret]

Seems like this is a great way for the clients to see personalized results with their sites climbing towards the top!