Do Page Views Matter? (ranking factor?)

[BeytzNet]

Hi,

I actually asked it a year and a half ago (with a slight variation) but didn't get any real response and things do change over time.

On my eCommerce website I have the main category pages with client side filtering and sorting. As a result, the number of page views is lower than can be expected.

Do you think having more page views is still a ranking factor? and if so is it more important than user experience?

Thanks

[iSTORM-New-Media]

Pageviews specifically...no. Popularity...yes. User experience is far more important though and Google's approach is based on sites giving users great experience and relevant content.

[RyanPurkey]

Rand recently did a whiteboard (beard?) Friday on this ~loosely~ under the broader scope of "Engagement" and I think you have to stick with keeping page views lumped into the overall scope of engagement, i.e., saying X page views per session = Y ranking boost is likely something no one can define precisely.

However, creating an on-site engagement score is something that is loosely feasible. For example you could look at time on site and a divide it by your GWT average time spent downloading a page to give yourself a rating engagement rating that. Lower the download time and you raise your score if the time on site stays the same. Increase time on site and the score goes up as well.

Does the number of page view equate into engagement? Maybe, although a site setup for getting lots of page views (pop culture sites with click lists, news articles, etc.) is going to have more than sites that do the bulk of their business via the home page. Perhaps a page view engagement metric you could create would be derived from your organic bounce rate: http://moz.com/blog/solving-the-pogo-stick-problem-whiteboard-friday

Hopefully this gives you a little direction in what to improve.

[David-Kley]

I agree with this to a certain degree. Page views and user behavior tell Google everything they need to know. No one at Google is manually looking at your site unless you are doing something horribly wrong.

A large amount of page views could signal to the Google bot that the site is popular. Page views combined with long on-site time and low exit rates can tell the bot that the page is not only popular, but also very well put together. (engaging)

[DirkC]

I agree with Ryan that it's more the engagement which is important than the pageviews.

If you have client side filtering & ordering - you could use event tracking in Analytics to get better idea of what visitors are actually doing on your page. Each time a user changes the view, you track an event in Analytics. When you have a high bounce rate on your site, this will also give you a better idea of the actual time spent on a page (remember that there is no measurement of visit duration when a user visits only 1 page and no events are tracked - see also: http://cutroni.com/blog/2012/02/29/understanding-google-analytics-time-calculations/).

[randfish]

I think there are elements of both iSTORM's and David's responses that are accurate. Page views in and of themselves are almost certainly not a raw ranking factor, but it could well be that engagement metrics that correlate well with page views (in many cases, at least) do have a direct or indirect positive impact on rankings.

I try not to guess at precisely the elements Google is or isn't using to influence the algorithmic rankings (based on what I read about their move to deep learning, it probably doesn't matter much anyway since the algo is becoming derivatives of thousands of metrics' interplays), but instead worry about the things that will cause the results and user experiences Google wants to reward. That was a lot of what this post was about: http://moz.com/blog/seo-correlation-causation.

[randfish]

Well said - engagement > page views. Google's smart enough to understand that on more complex sites and with more complex technology/JS/etc, those aren't always perfect corollaries for one another.