How difficult it is to keep your site in the first positions and get into the top 50 for a certain topic. You constantly need to analyze the site, analyze competitors, follow the news on the market and understand how to properly present your product or service so that both the search engine and the consumer notice it, while observing all the promotion requirements.

What is a behavioral factor?

One of the important indicators for a site is the behavioral factor, i.e. this is the behavior of people on the site, which can tell how interesting the resource is, how well it meets the needs of visitors and whether it is of interest to the consumer so that he will return again.

Some consider this indicator not very important, others, on the contrary, say that it is worth paying attention and analyzing behavior; in any case, you should definitely pay attention to it, and improving the indicators will only be beneficial.

Before examining the factors in more detail, we can consider the indicator using a simple example. The user, upon request “Buy a children's toy,” receives a specific website result that the search engine has prepared for him. Next, he selects a resource and begins to look at what toys there are, whether there is a description for them, and whether the price is indicated. If he likes a product and wants to buy it, then in one click the product should go to the cart and payment should take place in several steps. All these actions make up user behavior, which turns into behavioral ranking factors for Google, Yandex and other search engines.

Types of behavioral factors

All behavioral factors can be divided into external and internal. First, the user sees information about the site when it is returned for a search query, i.e., his external behavior develops. If he likes the brief information about the site (description, address, availability of contacts), then he can click on the link, thereby completing the action.

It is worth understanding that if the external factor works (there is a click on the link), then the internal one will also work (there is a visit to the site, which can be short, or it can be long, it all depends on the creators of the site).

It is always worth analyzing user actions over a certain period of time, for example, three months or six months. If some new information or a new product has been added that you want to tell current and potential customers about, but sales have not yet reached a certain level, then the analysis should be carried out more often, comparing weekly behavior indicators.

What indicators influence behavioral factors

To better understand users, it is worth analyzing their behavior on the site, and certain indicators can help with this:

How to improve PF

The figures obtained by indicators should be studied in comparison with several periods in order to get an overall picture of the development of the site. This is what can help determine further actions and an understanding of how to improve behavioral factors, if the statistics are not satisfied, there are few sales, but at the same time there are many visitors.

First, you need to understand how the page responds to the request, thanks to which the user comes to the site. Maybe he is looking for products, but there is only one on the site, and that is only for an order that will have to wait a week. In addition, the answer to the request should not just be specific, but expanded. For example, if you buy 5 pieces, you get free shipping or get the 6th product as a gift, etc.

Secondly, you need to analyze all the pages and see which of them are the most unpopular. Understand why the page is not liked and what can be changed in it so that the user begins to linger on it.

Thirdly, you can increase traffic to the entire site by optimizing the text and each page for a specific request. At the same time, it is better to promote one request on a separate page, without mixing them together, as this can negatively affect the ranking.

Fourthly, the placement of keywords in the text, in headings, in descriptions. But it is worth remembering: the density of such words on the page should not exceed 4-5%, since if this indicator is exceeded, the search engine may consider the promotion aggressive and the site will fall under the filter.

Perhaps, you can influence behavioral factors in such a simple way as improving the usability of the site, i.e. making it more convenient, understandable and simple, so that you can immediately find a product, put it in the cart, write a question to the manager, find out about delivery and payment. Don’t forget about setting up social buttons; millions of people spend time on social networks every day, and perhaps it’s more convenient for them to follow a company there.

The main improvement method is content optimization

If the indicators are not satisfactory, then the main task is to improve behavioral factors. SEO specialists say that the first thing to start with is to optimize the site’s content, i.e. show your true face to users. Content is something unique that no one else has, although many sites don’t try very hard and simply copy texts without notifying the copyright holders.

Content is everything that can attract the user: text, pictures and photographs, video files. For example, the text should be interesting, unique and of high quality. It should be divided into paragraphs to make it easier to read, structured (subheadings and sentences are interconnected), perhaps diluted with pictures or videos for a visual example.

For example, if this is an online clothing store, then you need good photographs, a description and, possibly, informational text to interest the buyer.

We should also talk about headlines, which play a significant role in promotion. The title should be attractive, short, but informative. It should prompt the user to take action - go to the site where he can find the answer to his request.

Cheat and ban

Search engines monitor and take into account behavioral ranking factors. Yandex, which is a Russian search engine, takes special care to ensure that there is no cheating. After all, the main principle is the purity of the search, so that the sites themselves achieve the first positions, doing a colossal job.

In 2014, website promotion using behavioral factors became a real boom, when many promotion companies paid attention only to this. These actions really brought results, positions grew, and clients were satisfied, seeing their site in the top, until Yandex introduced sanctions and began to impose sanctions on the site for cheating. Positions began to drop sharply, traffic fell, and sales practically stopped.

If you use any kind of cheating, you need to do it carefully and wisely so that behavioral factors naturally grow. Serpclick is a company that helps with promotion by calculating in advance the number of clicks on queries. Such a visit can be called natural, since the work is carried out by real people who come to the site, spend a certain time there, go to the necessary sections, and this does not look like cheating.

Behavioral ranking factors: "Yandex"

The user enters a query into the search bar and waits for a relevant answer. The search engine, using its algorithm, tries to select sites that can answer the request, using the behavioral factor, since a machine is not able to replace a person.

However, Yandex, using its technology, still uses human labor, due to which the quality of sites that are located in the first positions has increased. Employees conduct very strict supervision over the issuance, since the main task is the most accurate response to the request received.

Yandex collects data on behavioral factors from various sources. Firstly, data collection when issuing a request. If the link is frequently clicked and the visit to the site is quite long, it means that it becomes more relevant for this request and is better ranked in the search results. Secondly, it collects information from the counter, if one is installed on the site, or from the installed Yandex browser.

PF and Google system

Google's behavioral ranking factors look somewhat different, and some believe that this search engine does not pay attention to this at all. However, according to the analyzes carried out, it can be said that Google takes into account various factors much less than Yandex, but still analyzes sites:

There are also negative factors that the system also takes into account, which can affect the position of the site, and this is worth remembering, because someone uses such earnings on behavioral factors, winding them up in an unnatural way, and someone will then pay for it and will be sanctioned by Google. For example, the Penguin or Panda algorithm monitors low-quality links, of which there can be a lot.

Myths about behavioral factors

There are several misconceptions that many people are not aware of and think it is right, which leads to wrong actions.

Many people believe that the more people come to the site, the higher its position in further search results will be. On the one hand, this is true, but on the other hand, search engines take into account not one behavioral factor, but several that are interrelated.

Another rumor or myth is that site owners are monitored by search engines, so they let some resources appear on the first page, while others remain in the 20th and 30th positions. It cannot be ruled out that everyone is being watched, so the work is being carried out more carefully. But even if they don’t follow you, you should always remember that the work is done for the sake of the user, since he is a potential client.

What to expect in the future

What might happen in the future and how important will behavioral factors be? Yandex and other search engines will never give a direct answer, but several development options can be assumed:

• It is possible that behavioral ranking factors will cease to play an important role, as a different algorithm for issuing sites for search queries will appear and promotion technologies will have to be improved.
• It is possible that the importance of PF will increase, and this will be a revolutionary path in promotion.

In any case, you should not be afraid of one option or another, since you can always adapt to the work of search engines, configure the site correctly and achieve the desired indicators.

If you follow all the rules, create a site for users where they can find everything they need and want to come back again, then you won’t need to boost the site, use black hat promotion methods and other steps to achieve first positions in the search results. By constantly improving the resource and analyzing behavioral factors, you can achieve good positions, which will bring profit and success.

If you influence behavioral factors in a natural or artificial way, 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. A satisfied step is following an 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 place either internal or especially 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

Great article 0

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. Just 10 years ago, artificial intelligence was very 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 to the 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 buys a doll for a child, he is looking for a specific 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 ranking of the site. 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 began to visit this page, leaving 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 look at Google's behavioral ranking factors.

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 the Google search engine.
The only interesting fact is 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?

Hello everyone!

When ranking in search results, Yandex and any other search engine takes into account a lot of things, including behavioral factors (PF). Let's try to understand their impact on promotion in search engines. Let's go!

Behavioral factors are indicators of how users behave on your web resource. And to be precise, then:

• How much time do they spend on the site?
• Which ;
• How many pages are viewed when visiting;
• How to interact with various elements of the site;
• Well, there are many other factors.

All this is taken into account by search engines and subsequently used to rank sites in the SERP: the better the PF, the higher the position of the site. After all, Yandex and Google have recently been focusing on the usefulness of the issue for their users.

How do PSs obtain data about user behavior?

In order to transfer data about your visitors to Yandex, it is quite simple. Have you ever wondered why it is free? The exact same situation happens in Google, only with .

Of course, they can’t rely solely on PS analytics systems, so there are several more ways in which they learn the behavioral factors of a site:

1. Browsers. Nowadays, you can forget about privacy, as each browser can transmit information about you to search engines. And browsers from Yandex and Google: Yandex.Browser and Chrome, respectively, transmit an even larger array of data about you;
2. Special extensions for browsers. Probably, everyone has pre-installed add-ons from popular search engines, for example, an email client. They may also collect information about user behavior;
3. And there are many, many more ways to obtain data of interest to the PS.

Thus, it turns out that we are all burned out godlessly, which makes the life of an SEO optimizer only more difficult. After all, search engines put the user at the head, which means that all sites presented in the issue should be formed so that he receives the most complete answer to his question with convenience.

Promotion by behavioral factors

Let's think about how behavioral factors affect the position of the site in the SERP. So:

The search engine has some data about each site, among which yours is represented, for a specific request. You are in 9th position, and your main competitor is in 3rd. Your task: to enter the TOP-3.

To complete your task, you hired a copywriter with a high level of texts and filled your website with content. And they did it in such a way that the user received the most detailed answer to his question. Traffic flows to the page for this specific request, but if you rank in the TOP 3, you will receive even more visits.

The main competitor’s page is inferior in quality to yours, and the user who goes to it does not receive a proper response and does not stay there for more than a minute and a half. Whereas visitors to your page stay on it for almost two minutes more, and even show activity in the form of clicks on various links. The search engine noticed this.

What do you think will happen next? If your page has more users and gives a more comprehensive answer, which makes it stay for a long time, compared to your main competitor, you will take a more advantageous position, and the competitor will be pushed down.

From the above example we can conclude: in order to have good positions in the PS, you need to make a website based on user needs. That is, the web resource must be convenient for interaction And useful. This is what the principle of promotion by behavioral factors is based on.

However, due to this mechanism of search engines, one insidious “black” has appeared - cheating of behavioral factors.

Cheating behavioral factors

This method was once very popular among SEO optimizers, as it was highly effective. But soon the PS saw this trend and put forward countermeasures to such pampering in the form of a filter for cheating behavioral factors.

The principle of operation of the method is as follows:

1. You register in the PF promotion service;
2. Choose a method: catch up with robots or real people;
3. Then you feel a systematic improvement in behavior;
4. PSKs also see this and rank you higher in search results.

At first glance, everything is simple, but the filter quickly calculates all this action and gives a harsh punishment. And he calculates it like this:

Robots, that is, automatic PF cheating, are characterized by similar IP addresses, similar browsers, similar devices, and similar behavior. By comparing all data about visitors, the filter identifies the crime and punishes it.

If you decide to catch up with real people, that is, use manual promotion, then the filter can calculate this from the history of interaction with the search for the person who visits your site. A normal user will not become interested in cars, culinary recipes and IT technologies or anything else in one day.

Therefore, experienced webmasters do not recommend resorting to such services, because it is much better to improve the behavioral factors of the site in natural ways.

How to improve behavioral factors?

There are several “white” ways to improve PF:

1. Competent;
2. Filling the site with useful, interesting and comprehensive material. Suitable for this:

Behavioral ranking factors are an analysis of the actions of the search engine (search engine) of site visitors. The results of this analysis affect the ranking of the site in search engines.

How is information about the behavior of visitors on the site collected? I will list the main ways to obtain information about user behavior:

• statistics services (Yandex.Metrica and Google Analytics);
• web browsers (almost every more or less well-known and major search engine currently has its own Internet browser, through which the necessary statistics are collected (Google - Chrome, Yandex - Yandex.Browser, Bing - Internet Explorer));
• browser extensions (toolbars);
• other services and applications.

• Failure rate. This indicator records the user leaving the page immediately after viewing the first page. The percentage of visitors who leave the site without viewing anything other than the first page is called the bounce rate. Essentially, this characteristic reflects the relevance of the page displayed in the search results to the search query. The reasons for a high percentage of failures may be a boring design, a site structure that is incomprehensible to the user, and, if the user has satisfied his need for information or a product by opening the page he needs.
• View depth. This indicator reflects the number of pages viewed by one user. And the more there are, the better this indicator. But at the same time, the viewing depth may indicate a confusing and illogical site structure, which can already negatively affect search engine rankings.
• Time on site. The time spent by the user on the Internet resource is also considered an important criterion of behavioral factors. To increase the duration of the visitor's stay on the pages of the site, you can introduce a photo gallery, place something interesting that will take time and keep the user. But you need to be careful in this matter so that the potential buyer, if this is a commercial Internet resource, does not forget about the main purpose of the visit.
• Return to search. This criterion reflects the fact that if a user, having opened your site, wandered through its pages and even spent enough time there, still goes back to the search, then perhaps he did not solve his problem, or received an incomplete answer. Ideally, it should be like this: the user went to your site, got the necessary information on it, and no longer returned to the search results.
• Direct visits and branded traffic. An indicator that captures the number of visits to the site by entering the domain of the Internet resource in the address bar of the browser, or transitions from the bookmarks bar. If the site is remembered, then it was useful to users, and this is already a signal for an increase in ranking.

Many try to wind up behavioral factors by imitating user actions with special programs, but now this is recognized by search engine algorithms. Therefore, for such actions you can be subject to sanctions from search engines.

But if you still decide to try to cheat, then in order not to fall under the filter, use queries for which your site is no further than the TOP-30 in the search results. You need to raise your positions to this level using other methods. It is recommended to use at least 10 different queries for cheating. You should wind up no more than 20% of the real statistics, and preferably about 10% in general. At the moment, you can use the following services to cheat behavioral factors:

• User;
• SerpClic+PFLINKk+Vpodskazke;
• Miralinks (to enhance articles with clicks).

In general, the influence of promotion for website promotion is insignificant. Most users of promotion services are filtered. Best of all, cheating behavioral factors appear where other methods have already been exhausted, for example, link promotion.

Commercial factors

What are commercial factors? These are the indicators that determine the reliability of an online store.

To determine the need to add one or another so-called "commercial factor" to the site, you should analyze the top search results in the relevant topic.

The analysis can be done using a special matrix of commercial factors. In it, in the first column we write a list of competitors in our field from the TOP-30, and horizontally we write a list of all the commercial factors that we noticed among any of the competitors in the top. Then we simply note with pros and cons what exactly each of the competitors has on the site and what is missing. Thus, we will see what commercial factors are present among competitors who are in the top of the search engine for thematic queries, and what factors you need to add to your website in this regard.