Dear colleagues! In this article, I want to go into detail about the main behavioral factors and what actions a webmaster must take to influence them.

Behavioral factors have appeared in our country quite recently. Before this, Yandex said that it has sufficient information about users, but it does not yet know where to use it.

If you have a problem with the behavioral factors that we will talk about now, do not connect, do not feed all the bad information to Yandex.

So what are the main behavioral ranking factors we currently have?

The main ones are those that we can influence when promoting sites.

There are also numerous additional factors that we cannot influence in any way. Therefore, we do not take them into account.

1) Bounce Rate– when the user, having typed some request, search engine finds sites, clicks on one of them, opens the page, and, without walking around the site, exits it.

That is, in – out, bounce rate, one-page visit.

This bounce rate is not taken into account equally for all topics.

For example, you need to find out the postal code of the city of Kirillov. You typed a request, opened the site and wrote down the index. You do not need any more information on the site. Yandex also takes such requests into account.

Therefore, not for all topics, not for all query clusters, Yandex will take this into account.

2) Time spent on the site– how much time users spend on your website on average.

This is perhaps the main indicator today that Yandex takes into account.

If a user spends very little time with you (up to a minute), it means that he is not interested in your site. This means, accordingly, Yandex may lower the search results a little for this.

3) First and last clicks on search results. The user typed a query and several results were displayed. It starts opening all ten results.

And Yandex, in the calculation of the first and last result, which the user opened, ranks them higher, and slightly lowers the relevance of intermediate results.

If you clicked on the first site in the search results, it means that this site lured you in some way, and clicking on the last site means that you found the information you need on it, and you don’t need to search anymore.

We can influence these factors and improve them.

How:

Firstly, your website should in any case have an analytics system installed to track its effectiveness keywords, and to track some behavioral issues.

For this purpose, I usually use the Google.Analytics system on my websites; it is much more powerful and convenient.

Secondly, you need to make a cool, manageable, readable snippet, insert some enticements into it so that it attracts the user.

The more often you are clicked on this snippet, the more positive points you will earn.

Third, as for the site itself, is user convenience, so-called usability (i.e., ease of use of your site by the user).

So that you have a well-thought-out page structure, so that the user does not get lost on your site, so that he calmly moves from section to section, and it is convenient for him.

Fourth, this is work on landing pages. To keep a user on a page that is optimized, it must be 100% relevant to the query.

If you are optimizing a page for a lot of key queries, you have written large text, the user will simply get lost and exit.

That's why, Golden Rule, which should be used whenever possible, is one page - one request.

Always work on landing pages. There are testing tools such as Google Website Optimizer, which allows you to test this or that version of the page or this or that version of the page structure (multivariate testing).

If you have a high bounce rate on your landing page and users don't stay on it or read the content on it. commercial offers, which means it needs to be changed, which means we need to test new options.

Fifthly- This Additional Information Online. That is, create an additional cluster of pages on the site, where we will add information of interest to the user on the site.

Where to get this information? For example, using Yandex hints that appear when you type your key query in the search.

You have noticed more than once that when you type in a query, a list of other, identical queries appears below. These are Yandex hints, that is, what users are often looking for.

Therefore, it is necessary to expand the content on the site so that users spend more time on it and read more pages.

The conclusion is this: You should always work to improve your website. The more attention we pay to this, the less likely it is that Yandex will downgrade us for behavioral factors.

The material was prepared by the site team for the selection of services for business and promotion T rustland.ru

What are behavioral factors?

Behavioral factors are a set of actions taken by visitors on your website.

Search engines analyze user behavior and, based on this information, increase or decrease search rankings.Now these factors have become the most important in SEO promotion.

In addition to top positions in search engines, the result of good behavioral factors is high conversion resource, the return of visitors to you again and again, and other indicators of site success.

Everyone who is somehow involved in SEO promotion, we have heard repeatedly that it is important to create quality content, increase page loading speed, make sites convenient and many other things. But all this, as a rule, is not an independent ranking factor.

The result of all these actions is an improvement in behavioral factors. Thanks to high-quality content, convenient site structure, fast loading pages, people read articles to the end, are interested in your proposals, spend more time on the site and return to it in the future.

Types of behavioral factors

Types of behavioral ranking factors can be divided into 2 groups: “click” and internal.

"Click" factors

“Click-through” behavioral factors show how users behave in search results in relation to your project.

• Return to search. Search engines track how the user behaves after visiting a page, whether he will return to search for this query later, or whether he will be completely satisfied with the information he received. This is very important factor, because With its help, search engines understand which sites have content that satisfies users and which do not. The less frequently users return to search, the higher your site will rank.

Internal behavioral factors

Internal ranking factors include:

• % of failures;
• average time spent on site;
• viewing depth;
• visitor activity, interaction with any elements on the site;
• returning users to your site after some time and other similar nuances

These factors cannot be perceived separately, they must be considered as a whole. You can't increase page depth without reducing the bounce rate on your site or increasing the average time spent on the site. More precisely, it is possible, but these are extremely rare cases that do not change the essence.

A combination of factors shows how high-quality and interesting content how convenient the site is, and how well the linking has been worked out.

It is worth noting important nuance, the failure rate does not have to be zero, and the time spent on the site does not have to be very large. Search engines understand how visitors behave on resources that satisfy their needs in various niches. If a person is looking for a taxi phone number, he will most likely go to the website, write down the number and close it.

In this case, this will be positive, from the point of view of search engines, user behavior on the site. But these are rare niches; as a rule, you should try to minimize the percentage of failures and increase other indicators in this group.

Cheating behavioral factors

Nowadays there is a lot of talk about cheating behavioral factors. Such services are provided by various services and individual specialists. The essence is usually the same - bots or real users enter search queries for which you need to rise to the top, scroll through the results to your site and follow it. Then they spend some time on the pages, do some actions on it and then do not return to the search results for this request. In this way, they show search engines that your resource is supposedly the most useful for users for these queries.

Such manipulations can increase your position in the search results in the short term, but search engines have learned to calculate such actions, and for this they apply filters to the site, greatly reducing it in the search results. It is very difficult to get out of such sanctions, so we do not recommend engaging in such activities.

How to improve behavioral factors?

Improving “click” factors

To improve “click-through” behavioral factors on a website, you need to create attractive snippets. The snippet title is usually taken from meta title tag. Accordingly, the title should be made bright, using clarifying information, in order to attract the attention of users.

As a rule, the click-through rate of snippets is increased by numbers with some facts in the title and description. For example, for a page with an article (review of smart watches), the following snippet would be suitable: “Review of 10 popular smart watches of 2018.” User reviews.”

IN in this example we made it clear what the article was about, indicated the number of hours in the review and the year, making it clear that the review was current. Often webmasters, when the next year comes, change the year to the new year in all their articles. It's not very ethical, but it works.

Also, search engines often put snippet titles from the titles in the text.The description of snippets is taken either from the meta tagdescription, or from the text of the article. Respectively description should always be written on pages; often resource owners do not do this. It, like the title, should be of interest potential visitors and reveal the topic of the page.

You can’t lie in snippets and promise something that you don’t have information about on your page. Visitors will see that you don't have the information they need, they will quickly leave it, and search engines will understand that there is something wrong with this page.

Improving internal behavioral factors

To improve internal behavioral factors, it is necessary to improve the engagement of visitors on the site. First of all, the content should be of high quality and satisfy the needs of users who enter the search queries you need. If this is an article, then it should:

• expand on the topic indicated in the title;
• be clearly and efficiently written, do not use complex terms if they are not clear to your target audience;
• besides text contain others useful elements: navigation, suitable pictures, tables, videos, quotes;
• contain links to others useful pages your website or even to external resources.

To create high-quality content, we recommend studying materials from competitors who are in the top search results. From your competitors, you can see how they cover the topic, who they link to, and what useful elements are in their materials.

Except useful content your site should:

• load quickly: if the page does not open immediately, the user can go to other sites without waiting for it to load;
• be adaptive, now users spend more time on the Internet not from computers, but from smartphones;
• have a nice design and clear structure.

With all these actions you will improve the content of your project. As a result, user engagement will begin to increase, search engines will notice this and will rank your site higher in search results.

Hello, dear blog readers and subscribers. Everyone knows that there is such a ranking factor as behavioral factors. There is a lot of debate on the Internet about how behavioral factors are taken into account, and how the search engine ranks sites based on user behavior data on the site.

I decided to thoroughly understand this topic so that in the future neither I nor my readers would have questions or disputes on this topic. In this article I will look at behavioral factors in the Yandex search engine.

So what are behavioral ranking factors?

Behavioral factors is a ranking factor for websites in search engines. The assessment of behavioral factors consists of various points, such as the clickability of the snippet in the search results, user behavior on the site, failure rate, page viewing time, subject matter and purpose of the site.

Let me start with the fact that search engines now understand, if not everything, then a lot. For the Yandex search engine, it is not difficult to track where the user came from, what pages he visited, where he moved the mouse and clicked, how much time he spent on each page, etc. Yandex can take all this data from Metrica, its browser, from various extensions in the browser and its tools, such as site search, Yandex Maps, etc.

I think it doesn't take a genius to understand that any average programmer can easily develop an algorithm for assessing behavioral factors. Can you imagine what kind of minds work at Yandex? Programmers with average knowledge are definitely not hired there. If the “average” programmer can develop an algorithm, then what can we say about professionals.

Yandex has long had in its arsenal an algorithm for assessing behavioral factors. And if earlier this algorithm was not given great importance, then since last year, after the decline in the link ranking effect, behavioral factors have become the main ranking factor for Yandex.

What influences behavioral factors

No one except Yandex representatives will give you all the methods for assessing behavioral factors. But of course they keep it a secret. Among the main assessment factors are the following:

• CTR of the snippet in the search results;
• Rejection rate;
• Viewing time;
• User behavior on the site;
• User return;
• Subject and purpose of the site;

Let's look at each of these points in more detail so that you have a complete picture.

CTR of the snippet in the search results. CTR is the ratio of impressions to click-through rate. Let’s imagine a situation where the user entered the query “cellular nokia phone 105 ds black.” There are two sites in the TOP search results. In first place is the online store Technopoints, in second place is Eldorado.

Which snippet do you think will get more clicks? Based on whose brand is cooler and more recognizable. IN in this case This is Eldorado. This is a good signal to the search engine that users trust the second site more and it needs to be increased in the search results.

Rejection rate. The bounce rate is directly affected by the design and usability of the site, as well as the relevance and relevance of the page content. If a user lands on a site from a search and sees a terrible blue background with black letters and some kind of banner jumps out onto the floor of the screen, then the probability that the user will immediately close the site is 99.9%. Do you think Yandex will rank such a site highly? Never.

It may also be that the user entered a query that interests him into the search, and in the search results, among 10 sites, yours is in first place. The user visited your site, viewed the page, but did not find the answer to his question. He returns to the search and begins visiting other sites in the search results one by one until he finds the answer to his question. He finds the answer only on the third site. This is a signal that the competitor’s site should be increased in search results on this issue.

Watching time. Watching time is the biggest behavioral misconception. This parameter influences behavioral factors, but its influence is minimal and can be ignored altogether.

The reason is simple, the user is looking for an answer to a question. Having found the answer, he will leave the site in any case. The creators of the algorithm understand this very well.
User behavior on the site. If we look at Webvisor, we can track user behavior in video format. Yandex can see the same thing.

The search engine can understand whether it is convenient for the user to move around the site, whether the information is conveniently presented, where attention is most often focused, where people click most often, and much more.

You can watch this video from Yandex representative Ekaterina Gladkikh, which clearly shows that Yandex algorithms perfectly understand user behavior on the site, and it will not be difficult for them to determine the cheating of behavioral factors. At the sixth minute of the video it’s absolutely amazing :)

Returning users. If the site is interesting, they will bookmark it, subscribe and return to it again. Yandex sees this perfectly well and takes it into account when assessing behavioral factors.

Subject and purpose of the site. All of the above factors are directly related to the theme and purpose of the site. For example, let’s take an entertainment website and an online store. Naturally, an entertainment site will have a greater browsing depth. People go to entertainment sites to have an interesting time, and to an online store with specific purpose- buy goods.

It’s the same with information sites. On them, users can spend even several tens of minutes on one page, reading information, watching videos, then go to linked articles that supplement the information, and perhaps read information about the author. The same cannot be said about commercial sites. On commercial sites, the user visits a page with a product or service, after getting acquainted, looks for a review page, and if everything suits him, he goes to the cart. He is not interested in the history of the company and its news. He pursues a specific goal.

The conclusion follows from this. You cannot compare all types of sites. If for one site a failure rate of 20% is the norm, then for another it is a reason to think about usability.

I will finish writing here. In the following articles I will tell you about the filter for cheating behavioral factors and what methods can be used to improve behavioral factors.

If you influence behavioral factors naturally or artificially, then this note will help you understand whether you are moving in the right direction.

This time there is almost no gag - the list of synthetic behavioral factors was published at the goodwill of Yandex in the report Through-the-Looking Glass: Utilizing Rich Post-Search Trail Statistics for Web Search.

Yandex itself dates the article to September 1, 2013. Was presented at the CIKM 2013 conference, held from October 27 to November 1, 2013 in Burlingame (USA)

There is a mention of the report on the Yandex website, but the text itself is still not there. Do you realize that you've said too much? 🙂

NB: I express my gratitude to Ilya Zyabrev AlterTrader Research ltd for providing the text of the report.

Yandex behavioral ranking factors

QueryDomCTR– average CTR value of all domain documents for a given query

QueryUrlCTR– the average CTR value of a specific document for a given request.

QDwellTimeDev– standard deviation (deviation) from the average time spent on the document upon request. Can be used to filter out PF cheats.

QDwellTime– this parameter is not mentioned in the report, but it is obviously used as a ranking factor. Because if we calculate the standard deviation for a random variable, then we must also know the expected value (also known as the average value) of this variable. Accordingly, this is the average time a visitor spends on a document upon request.

AvSatSteps– the average number of satisfied steps on the site. Satisfied step - transition to internal link after 30 seconds of being on the document. It is important that the average value of such steps is only ~0.2 or less per domain, regardless of the subject of the site.

NB: As follows from this report, Yandex “knows” what topic the site page belongs to. Based on our own set of second-level domains with manually defined topics (as I understand it, this is nothing more than Ya.Catalog, possibly expanded by Dmoz.org) and using a naive Bayes classifier, any document from the index is assigned to a particular topic.

AvDwellTime– the total average time a visitor spends on a document for various search queries.

DwellTimeDev– standard deviation (deviation) of the time spent on the site. It can also be used to track PF markups.

90thDwellTime– this is the top decile, also known as the 90th percentile of average time spent on the site. Allows you to discard added AvDwellTime and QDwellTime.

10thDwellTime– This is the bottom decile of average time spent on the site. Allows you to define doorways. It is obvious that Yandex expects improvements from “white” webmasters here.

TimeOnDomain– total time spent on the site. For all requests for any documents.

CumulativeDev– standard deviation (deviation) from the average time spent on the site

A few snide remarks

1. Are you afraid that boosting PF reduces conversion and this negatively affects rankings? Don’t anger the SEO god - Yandex can only count satisfied steps. He doesn't even think about conversion. .
2. To satisfy Yandex engineers, you should break large articles into small ones. Very small. Because the average person reads less than 300 words per minute. And engineers are interested in a click after 30 seconds. By this point, you've already read about 300 words in this short piece. By comparison, a good review article is considered to be at least 1000 words long.
3. For the same reason, you should not post either internal ones, much less external links at the beginning of the document. So that there are no unsatisfied transitions.

Instead of a conclusion

This Yandex report perfectly explains why boosting behavioral ranking factors for 3-4 queries does not work. Namely, this is the number of queries that a regular (median) optimizer tries to generate. The average is only 9. A successful optimizer generates an average of 40 queries and more. This is the only way to significantly influence, for example, AvDwellTime and TimeOnDomain.

I presented this data in June 2013 on

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What behavioral site ranking factors do Yandex and Google use? What behavioral factors influence the ranking of sites in Yandex and Google? Hi all! Today we’ll talk about behavioral website ranking factors. Let's discuss behavioral factors in the search engines Yandex and Google. These search engines, in my opinion, react slightly differently to the behavior of visitors to the site. Let's figure out what behavioral factors are and what factors are taken into account by the search engines Yandex and Google.

Behavioral website ranking factors are how people react to your website. It consists of many indicators, such as snippet clickability, site clicks, time spent on your site, clicks on links on the site, comments on the site, returns to the site, bookmarking your resource, clicks from social media. networks, likes, reposts, etc.
There is a category of people who try to deceive the search engines Yandex and Google by cheating behavioral factors.
Even you and I can see whether your blog has been cheated or not. Even 10 years ago artificial intelligence was very highly developed.
Have you ever played computer games?
It's not easy to beat the computer, right?
This was a long time ago, imagine what algorithms are now embedded in the search engines Yandex and Google.
Therefore, I believe search engines see whether your site is interesting to visitors or not.
Let's look at all the behavioral factors of website ranking in the Yandex and Google search engines.

• Snippet clickability in Yandex and Google. If your site is ranked 5th in search engines, and they click on it. This is a signal to the Yandex and Google search engines that your site should be ranked higher.
• Time spent on the site by visitors. In general, there are many misconceptions about this. Some say 15 seconds, some say 30 seconds spent on your visitor community is enough for you to be counted as a transition. My opinion is that search engines take into account behavioral factors of the site and not time, i.e. They care about activity on the site. It also happens that a visitor spends an hour on one page without performing any activity.
  I stupidly opened the page and went on a walk, an hour later I picked up and closed your page. Meanwhile, Yandex metrics shows 0 activity. In general, of course, if people come to you and immediately close it, this tells the Yandex and Google search engines that either your site is of poor quality, or this page does not correspond search query. This factor negatively affects the ranking of your site in Google and Yandex.
• Returns visitors to your site. If people subscribe to your site and leave them in bookmarks, Yandex and Google will definitely notice this. Your site is interesting and will be ranked higher than competitors.
• Comments on the blog. It has a very positive effect on the promotion of your site. Some are even ready to sacrifice the weight of the page in the eyes of search engines in order for their blog or site to be actively commented on.
  Below I will tell my story on this factor.
• User transitions from social media networks. It has a positive effect on the ranking of the page and the site as a whole. Another thing is that these transitions are usually not of high quality. I'll give you my example. I have a group in contact, and when I post it, it means a thematic post, a very thematic post! What do you think? There are transitions, but low activity, time spent on this page is 5 - 40 seconds. Whereas, when you go to this page from Yandex search, this indicator is from 40 seconds to 7 minutes with good activity with visits up to 14 times! the same user to this page. In general, something needs to be improved in VK... They love freebies on VKontakte), but they’re too lazy to even read the page to the end).
• Differences in the themes of the sites. Everything is simple here; each topic has its own indicators of click-throughs and bounce rates. Commercial sites. It is clear that if a person goes to a child for a doll, he is looking for a certain model. Try not to please your child? Weak?!), yes to me). This means that the viewing depth of the site will be 1 page. For the entertainment theme of the site, the indicators are completely different.

Let's now look at how Yandex and Google react to behavioral factors and how this affects the site's ranking. Let's start with Yandex.

I would call the behavioral factors of Yandex ranking as liberalism.
In my opinion, Yandex is generally alien to any kind of optimization. Yandex responds very responsively to behavioral factors.
Let's look at this with examples.
I have a page on this site that is in the top Yandex.
In Google this page is in the top 30). Moreover, it is clear that Google indexed it much earlier.
In Yandex, she began to rank in the top almost immediately.
The most interesting thing is that this page is only 43% relevant to the search query!
How did she hook Yandex?

There are two reasons.
1. New information for the Yandex search engine.
I looked at the sites ranked in the top for this request, the information on these pages is completely different, i.e. uniqueness worked.
2. From the very beginning, visitors started coming to this page and left comments.
Yandex did not miss these moments.

Second example. I wrote a post, published it, and it just so happened that it received clicks and comments, there was a thematic link on the H2 header, and there were several clicks on it.
What do you think, how does Yandex react to this?
Where did this page end up in the Yandex ranking?
Right! In the top 10, despite the fact that this site is young, that page is fresh, the request is quite competitive.
Those. ignoring all factors of optimization, relevance, TIC, trust, this page is ranked very highly by Yandex.
Over time, this page actually slipped into the top 40), but that’s another story.
Let's consider behavioral factors google rankings.

Behavioral Google Ranking Factors

If I assessed the behavioral ranking factors of Yandex as liberal, then Google is conservative.
Although Yandex and Google are the two best search engines.
For Google, relevance and site optimization are important.
Google did not react in any way to the examples that I described above for Yandex.
I didn’t notice any increase in the ranking of the site from Google.
Yes, slowly but surely the posts of this site are starting to rank higher in search engines. google system.
The only one interesting fact that Google can translate words and your post can get to the top for a completely incomprehensible request.
That's all for me.
Have you had any interesting behavioral factors that caused your page to rank highly?