Does CTR Affect Ranking & Authority? Can PPC Influence That Too?

[tprg]

Hi everyone,

Good CTR and bounce rate seem to affect rankings positively, but what about domain authority? Is that something built entirely on links and semantics, or does CTR play a factor too?

Consider a homepage ranking for its brand name. Switching off any brand PPC will increase the natural listing's CTR. Would that have a positive SEO impact on the homepage/domain?

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi boux,

At the moment Google is probably incorporating the CTR in some way to calculate the rankings. They know from the period of time between visiting SERPs how much time you\v'e spend on a page. I however doubt that they will use it to calculate the domain authority. As for some pages it won't say a thing that you've only been to a page for 30 seconds. To be fair I don't think you'll ever be able to calculate the impact of switching off your PPC brand listings to see as positive impact on SEO.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

As Martijn said, I can't see that DA would be affected by CTR. This is more likely affected by links and how Google perceives you as an authority site. I am sure there will be lots of other factors that play a part in this also.

-Andy

[JaneCopland]

Hi there,

Since Domain Authority is a Moz metric, it is not affected by CTR due to Moz not being able to determine or collect this sort of data.

As far as CTR and PPC influencing search rankings goes, there are good reasons why Google would not rely on either metric too intently. For one, it would be very easy to mimic a very bad bounce rate on a competitor's site: set bots to click on search results to a competitor website, click straight out.

It would be a big conflict of interest for PPC to influence SEO either positively or negatively, and although none of us are naive enough to believe that Google always does everything with the best of intentions, they would be in a world of trouble if this type of behaviour were proven.

CTR and bounce rate are so easily influenced / manipulated by factors outside of quality, authority and relevancy that I assume their influence on rankings is quite low. Sure, this data is valuable to Google, but it won't be a signal that has a huge amount of relevance.