In a recent interview conducted by the Technology Review with Peter Norvig director of research at Google, one of the significant elements to the topics in the discussion was the admission that Google tracks visitor clicks. So if a user clicks on a link to a site and doesn’t return to Google to repeat the search again, then it is taken as a sign of quality and the resulting site fulfilled user expectations.

I recall in the late 90’s a student friend of mine was recruited by a then SEO company to make searches, click on specific links in a bid to influence ranking results. Does this mean that we could see the reappearance of such techniques, 100’s of folks in Delhi perhaps instead of sending out link spam they will be there sitting behind proxy servers searching and clicking all day.

Of course how does Google do this, we know they correlate data from various sources such as user IP addresses, Google Toolbar, Google account Adwords, Adsense and Gmail data along with Google analytics. So it is not difficult for them to identify site “stiction”

That said it should be noted that this emphasises one point, bounce traffic needs to be monitored and if at all possible avoided. For genuine sites with genuine rankings it would appear that for the future your rankings may depend on your users positive experience.