Todd Malicoat is an independent marketing and business consultant from the SEO school of thought . He's done strategic consulting for companies large and small, and built and sold several sites of his own.

Fun commentary, but technology sometimes sucks…Graywolf and I talked with Greg about click stream analysis and its’ potential impact on search engine results positions. Most people that talk about search engine rankings sometimes forget to realize that there are 100’s if not 1000’s variables to tweak in the search algorithms. Disclaimer: generally when I ramble on the radio, it is nearly all pure speculation.

There are at minimum a good 100 + prominent variables or more for influence and rankings.

Qualifying for search click stream validation:
I think there may be the potential need to pass certain variable threshholds in order to validate the findings that a site should be in the top 10,20,50, etc.
Variables I would validate with toolbar data:

Top 8 Ideas for tracking Clickstream to Validate Quality Indicators
What I would do if I search relevancy was my goal:
-track clickthroughs on serps
-link clickthrough
-bookmarks
-history
-user data
-freshness
-community data
-social trend data

Graywolf, GoodROI, and I talked on the implications of click data

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for GoodKarma.

From threadwatch - clickstreams are dirty

Google patent

Rand on the historical patent

Notes:
Clickstream data is used to validate quality indicators
Example: influx of links from 10k sites clickstream data must validate that x% of the links are clicked on by users

Top most likely uses of toolbar data
1· Validation that links are for users (monitoring clickthrough)
2· Validation of site size to detect cloaking page filesize etc.
3· Understanding different types of sites different verticals have different behavior
4· Users will spend more time on a reviews site and visit periodically vs. less time on a directory type site
5· Number of times results are clicked

1 - history data relevant to:
2 -

• The “number of times that a document is selected from a set of search results
• The “amount of time one or more users spend accessing the document”
• The relative “amount of time” compared to an average that users spend on a particular site/page

Statdubl says…stat I missed in the radio show.
MSN messenger is the MS community data at 26 - 28 min. range.

Dumbest thing out of my mouth: “it’s always gettin’ tougher and tougher…”.

Sources Cited:
Google historical data patent
Roger on community loyalty

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