Cheezhead

Google is apparently now tracking click-thrus via their organic search. To see what I mean, do a search for any keyword. For example, enter HRSEO in the search box.

Place your mouse over the top listing, and you’ll notice the status bar at the bottom of your browser shows http://www.hrseo.com.

No shocker there, right? However, if you right-click on the listing and select Copy Shortcut in IE, or Copy Link Location in Firefox, and then paste the text into an editor, you’ll get something like this:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&
url=http%3A//www.hrseo.com/&ei=Hl4XQ8imB
4-MiAGNvKH9DA&sig2=boLcjo5iCUaWZO9

You’ll notice this click goes to HRSEO’s homepage, but routes through Google first.

There’s nothing concrete about what Google is doing with this information, but I’ll take a shot at guessing they’re tracking which sites get the bulk of clicks for particular keyphrases.

It’s intelligent to say that from there, the sites with the highest click-thru rate will be the recipients of a bump in rankings for related searches.

Few sites take into account the importance of marketing via a search engine’s results page, but it seems like it might be time to put some mental energy around it.

Things like your site’s title tag, meta description and even URL all come into play, in conjunction with rankings, to get a user to click-on your site over another.

Does your message motivate clicks? Go do a search on your own site and ask yourself if you’d click on your site.

Additionally, it’s fair to say that Google now also has the ability to track the level of click backs once a user goes to a particular site. This will help Google discover what sites may be spam based on a quick exit after getting to the landing page.

Therefore, if you’re site has a quick exit rate, jumping back to the Google results page, you may have to look forward to penalties in your search engine rankings.

To sum up, help protect your site and your rankings by writing good title tags and meta descriptions, and providing a site that warrants deep exploration from visitors.