A while ago, I saw a discussion on the Dianshi Forum about using a large number of clicks on your own website in Baidu’s search results to further improve your ranking. The logic is that the more clicks on a website in the search results, the more useful it is and the more users like it, and the search engine will further improve the ranking of this website.
However, this kind of user behavior is noisy data and is extremely easy to cheat. It is very difficult for search engines to extract the essence from this data.
A few days ago, Google employee John Mu made it clear in the Google Help Forum that operations such as clicking on a website and then immediately clicking the back button will not affect the crawling, indexing and ranking of your website. It’s too easy to cheat and too easy to be exploited by competitors.
There is a lot of data like this that seems very valuable, but is difficult to extract useful information from. For example, send spam links to competitor websites.
Ultimately, the key to effectively utilizing user behavior data lies in how search engines confirm a user's identity, which means accurately identifying who is responsible for a specific behavior. If a large number of real users click on your website and stay for a long time, it will definitely be beneficial to rankings. If the search engine can determine that this large number of clicks is done by you alone, or by a group of people related to you, the effect may be exactly the opposite.
The same goes for sending bulk messages to your opponents. The key is to identify who is sending the bulk messages.
I once wrote an article about No Escape, which was more of a science fiction and fantasy. But who is sure that one day, it will not be possible to judge identity through genes online? Twenty years ago, if someone had told me that there would be the Internet, there would be websites, and there would be SEO, I would have thought it was science fiction at that time.
Now search engines actually have a large amount of data that can help identify users. For example, Google can determine and identify user identities through cookies, JS scripts, toolbars, gmail accounts, Adsense accounts, Google Analytics accounts, IP addresses, user search data, etc.
If a user has logged in to a gmail account and then visits any webpage with Adsense, Google Analytics, and any JS script controlled by Google, these access data will be recorded. There are now so many websites with Google JS scripts. In addition to the obvious Adsense, Google Analytics, etc., Google has also acquired DoubleClick, the largest online advertising company. Countless advertising websites are using Google's code. Therefore, it is difficult for your every move on the Internet to escape the eyes of Google.
If you install Google's toolbar, it will be clearer how you visit the website.
Even if you can be extremely clean and leave no trace, you will not log in to any Google account, turn off the JS script function in the browser, and do not use the toolbar. In short, you are an invisible person, and there is still no guarantee that search engines will not be able to find you.
For example, if you buy and sell links through an affiliate, this is something Google hates. Even if you can achieve invisibility, you can't guarantee that everyone else in this alliance will remain invisible. If some people in this link buying and selling alliance are exposed, and these people visit your website from time to time to check the links they bought, your website and yourself will be exposed.
Think search engines aren’t that smart? Who knows? It’s better to be careful.