A few days ago, this google patent application was awarded a patent that details a “System and method for modulating search relevancy using pointer activity monitoring ” according to the patent title and abstract. If you read on, it explains that the data the patent suggests collecting is the mouse location on page and hover duration. What could this mean for SEO?
    The simple answer is that there’s a new factor influencing rankings. The patent calls it the “client attention coefficient.” That wording suggests that it will have a direct effect on how “relevancy” is calculated for all Google searches. Any time a search engine makes a change in how they rank sites it’s reflected in the rankings. That may sound obvious, but it’s something every good SEO thinks about when changes start happening. Should Google incorporate this mouse tracking idea into their search engine it could produce some interesting results both good and bad. One thing we know is that we’d have to start paying more attention to how our indexed pages appear on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages.)
    When Google builds a SERP for a search query it takes the titles and descriptions of the results and serves them up as a vertically aligned list with higher ranking pages at the top. The typical searcher begins scanning with their eyes at the page and sometimes follow with a mouse pointer. Referring back to the patent, this shouldn’t have a direct effect because the patent proposes a timer or “threshold value” that would filter out times when a cursor “temporarily passes through [these] regions.” However, this doesn’t change the fact that the results at the top are more likely to get mouse pointer attention. Depending on how much weight Google assigns to this new metric this could strengthen the barrier-to-entry for new rankings even more.
    The “client attention coefficient” might also accidentally favor indexed pages with longer titles and descriptions. The two search results below illustrate an example case.





    A result that shows up on a serp (search engine results page) looking like the first result might not hold a visitor’s attention as long as the second. Another advantage the second has over the first is that it simply occupies more space on the page. It will grab more mouse time because of this but, Google’s engineers aren’t dumb. I bet they’ve already thought up a solution but there’s no best way around it. There will be some artificial-ness leaking into the organic rankings.
    We won’t know how effective it is in improving results until Google actually implements it if they ever do. They may never implement this hopefully out of respect for our privacy. Hopefully we can prevent Google from looking through visitor’s webcams and tracking eye movement across the page. Anyone want to file that one now before Google does?

There are two major types of analytics systems: client-side and server side. Client-side analytics relies on an event fired by a user to record a page-view. Google Analytics is the most common client-side system. Client-side packages are beneficial because they can also track non-page-loading events, such as interacting with a form or video. Being user-ran, they can also harvest user data like screen resolution and connection performance. A server-side system, like AWStats, looks at server logs to determine the volume of pages requested. Server-side analytics are good for tracking special cases– like lost pages that need redirects, the traffic of search engine spiders, and mobile users, but have limited insight on conventional PC users.

It’s important to recognize that client-side and server-side analytics never match exactly. Since a client-side system cannot record traffic by robots, and some limited users– like mobile users with no image or script support, it tends to undercount by a few percent. Server-side systems often mis-classify users based on browser headers- many obscure browsers emulate IE or Safari.

Moreover, even inside a category, disputes occur. Does a visitor who sees a second tab on one page count as a bounce? Is a user who hits a Bing ad driven by Bing or the Microsoft ad network? Analytics vendors have many judgement calls. An important guideline is to use analytics data for month-to-month comparison in a single vendor. Google Analytics for June compares sensibly with Analytics for May, but trying to reference it against AWStats for June leads to confusion and bad decisions. Occasionally, a disparity between packages can reveal unusual user behaviour, such as a denial-of-service attack seen by the server-side system and not Google Analytics, but it’s more often statistical noise.

I’m a big fan of Google Chrome. While working on one of our travel websites located at Hawaii Tours I stumbled onto this gem. Not only does Chrome automatically suggest using a site’s Open Search engine when typing in the same domain you are on in the search bar – now apparently Google can identify standard search features such as search.php and serve them up in the same way. The site in question has no open search xml file and chrome still gives the option to use search.php. Check out the screenshot below:

You can verify for yourself that I never got around to making an open search xml file by trying the following link: http://hawaiitours.com/opensearch_desc.xml – which of course doesn’t exist and never has. If you want to check if Google has found your site’s search feature and included it just visit your domain and start typing the domain name sans www.

I’m personally not sure whether or not I think this is a good idea. I could see several potential problems where a site had several search features and it could be a bug as opposed to a feature. I suspect that simply adding an open search meta tag would resolve it.