Brian Patterson says, “There has been a lot written about click-through rate (CTR) as it relates to SEO. Some say that itreally doesn’t matter. Others say that it is very possible it does.

Reading articles, experiments and case studies is great, but we’re always eager to test things out for ourselves. We maintain a bunch of test websites for just that purpose. And so we decided to run a CTR test on one of the websites we hadn’t touched in a long while. The hope was to gather some evidence of our own.

If you’re looking for a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled test, this ain’t it. But if you’re looking for more anecdotal evidence suggesting how the algorithm might react to clicks based on an experiment of n=1, this is it.

The site

We started by selecting a site that hadn’t had a lot of work done to it. In fact, it was one of our more neglected test sites, which made it ideal for a click-through rate test, as we could attribute most movement (or lack thereof) to the test itself“.

Test points to likely influence of click-through rate on search rankings

Search Engine Land

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