Toolbar Theory

We all know the Google Toolbar (in advanced form) send data about the sites you visit back to Google.

We also know that Google likes to measure popularity.

Is it therefore hard to beleive that the toolbar will be used, if it isn't already, to help with this ranking? Isn't actual surfer statistics perhaps a more accurate view of popularity than how your links are set up?

Now, I may just be up with the fairies, but if there's anything to this theory then we would gain some advantage by making sure our members were using the tool bar.

Am i just being daft?

I don't think you're being daft. It's a good line of thinking, even if it may not be contributory to the PR of a page/site - I'm pretty sure there must be an element of PR which comes from user interaction and simply not just algorithms and it's various elements.

I have always thought that your listing being popular in search results for a particular keyword, i.e. a search for 'free' and a site at position 8 was clicked more frequently than a result higher in the rankings, would be recorded and used for allocating PR for the next Google update. Again, it might not be the case at all, but it might be!

I have thought on the same lines as you and would be interested to know if others have too.

On the subject on making sure your visitors use the toolbar too, you would need to make sure they have downloaded that particular version of it (the one that sends info to google) and that the number of visits they make to your competitiors are less than your own, otherwise you'd be shooting yourself in the foot

One way to test this would be to find a site or page with a very low PR, get everyone you know with the toolbar to make it their start page and visit it frequently and see what affect, if any, it has to the PR the following Google update.

I have one site (www.lowestoftonline.com) where it ranks at number 2 for a search for 'Lowestoft' even though the rank 3 has a higher PR and many, many more backward links to it. It's domain (www.lowestoft.net) obviously has the search term as the full domain too, if that counts?

(please don't hit me with spam reports, it's a not-for-profit site and only offers interest to those who live or have lived in Lowestoft, but it's a good example of Google's antics)

Cheers,

I think there could be something in it but if they took account of sites visited with the toolbar they would get a pretty skewed cross section of the internet, basically just webmasters and search engines obsessive's like us affiliates.

You could be very right there!

It would be interesting to know, from Google, how many people are using the toolbar.

Although it is linked to from their home page, I know of very few people who actually use it other than, like you said, webmasters and obsessives!

Cheers,

I remember reading some similar stuff at webmasterworld

www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/3066.htm

but it's more about whether using the toolbar to visit pages then means google comes to index them.

was trying to find some numbers on toolbar users but came across this instead!

zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-867272.html

So googlebot crawls sites after someone visits with the advanced tool bar.

This makes sense as i only started using the toolbar a few weeks a go. Now i get crawled daily by googlebot. I didn't before.

The Alexa toolbar collects information in just this way, so i am sure it may also be used by google at some time.

www.alexa.com/

Adam Badini
Marketing Director
www.otherlandtoys.co.uk