Does Traffic help improve my page rank?

[Joshlaska]

I've learned many things to do to improve my page rank over the past several months (thanks, seomoz). Our website, www.farnorthkennel.com, has improved greatly thanks to your help.

Here's my question. I have 13000 fans on FB. If they all read a blog post I put up, does this help my page rank?

Does new visitors hitting up my website make the Google gods smile upon me?

[KevinBudzynski]

I believe pagerank is mostly measured by the number and popularity of inbound links. So by having a high pagerank increases your traffic instead of the other way around.

However, is traffic a component of the Googl Algo? There is some debate on this and the only ones that really knows is Google.

[ThompsonPaul]

Given that Google doesn't really have any way of measuring the traffic to your site from Facebook, (or anywhere other than search/Google+) it's highly unlikely (my opinion - impossible) that traffic volume itself is a ranking factor.

But of course there's rising evidence that social influence correlates to ranking influence, and the more people reading your blog posts, the more likely some of them are to link to it, which is certainly one of the search engines' main ranking signals.

If you've got that many engaged followers, have you considered a mini-campaign to try to get them to link to your posts, Joshua? Especially from their own sites (outside of Facebook)?

Paul

[Joshlaska]

That confuses me, Paul.

Google measures the traffic from Facebook to my site for me - it's in my Analytics.

[KevinBudzynski]

I think what Paul meant was that the data collected in Analytics is not used for ranking purposes. There are many sites that do not use GA, and it would be unfair to use for that purposes. However, Google offers GA for free and I am sure that there are mining purposes that may affect different Google products.

[ThompsonPaul]

Sorry, Joshua - I should have been more specific and said Google Search doesn't have any way of measuring the traffic. Google has stated a number of times that it does not use Google Analytics data for search rankings. (In fact it would be against it's own terms of service). In addition, if you think about, it really couldn't work as a reliable ranking signal.

First, only about 60% of websites run Google Analytics - and a huge proportion of the major websites don't as they use other specialised tools like WebTrends or Site Catalyst. Can't really use a signal that wouldn't apply to vast number sites.

In addition, it's trivially easy to "tamper" with your Google Analytics code to make it vastly inflate the numbers it reports. I could literally double or triple your reported GA  traffic with about 5 minutes of adjusting the code on your website.

Hope that makes sense?

Paul

[Joshlaska]

Thanks, Paul and Kevin. I understand now.

I've often thought about doing a campaign to find out which of my followers would be willing to give us a link. As I understand it, offering a coupon or something would be a big no-no, so I've been a little unclear on how to do that.

I really like the tools here and the list on www.pointblankseo.com. They've both helped, but we're new and it's slow, yet enjoyable, going.