Google Says Again It Does Not Use User Engagement As A Search Ranking Factor

Google’s John Mueller said again that Google Search does not use “engagement” as a factor for ranking or other purposes in Google Search. Google Search does not know if your web page has a high or low level of user engagement metrics and even if it did, it does not use it for ranking purposes, John said.

I do apologize if the image above threw you off for what this story was about, by the way.

The question came up at the 7:07 mark into the video where the SEO said that the site has really improved its engagement metrics in a big way. So she asked “Can a single page with extremely high engagement and traffic have an influence on the domain as a whole? Do these signals trickle to other pages on the site and play a positive role at that domain level?”

John Mueller of Google responded that no, Google does not use engagement as as a factor. He said “So I don’t think we would use engagement as as a factor.”

He then went on to warn about looking at if the queries that drive engagement are relevant, he said “the thing I might watch out for is if it drives engagement for the kind of things that you care about.” He said “that’s is just something that I’ve sometimes seen where a page might be very visible for certain queries but when you look at the queries like I don’t really want to rank for that like my topic is is something else.”

He also said that that the whole site can impact other areas of the site, he said “But it is the case that usually pages within a website are interlinked with the rest of the website and through those internal links across the website we do forward some of the signals. So if we see that a page is a really good page and we would like to show it in search a lot maybe it also has various external links going there then that gives us a lot of additional context about that page and we can kind of forward some of that to the rest of the website. So that, usually that’s a good thing.”

Here is the video embed:

Here is the transcript:

So I don’t think we would use engagement as as a factor.

But it is the case that usually pages within a website are interlinked with the rest of the website and through those internal links across the website we do forward some of the signals. So if we see that a page is a really good page and we would like to show it in search a lot maybe it also has various external links going there then that gives us a lot of additional context about that page and we can kind of forward some of that to the rest of the website. So that, usually that’s a good thing.

The thing I might watch out for is if it drives engagement for the kind of things that you care about. That’s is just something that I’ve sometimes seen where a page might be very visible for certain queries but when you look at the queries like I don’t really want to rank for that like my topic is is something else. So that might be something just to kind of like take a cautious look at the metrics.

Forum discussion at YouTube Community.