What Google Sees: Checking Whether Your Traffic Affects Ranking
In modern SEO, efforts are increasingly focused not only on content and links, but also on signals that are formed after a click. Behavioral factors (BF), i.e. how users interact with a site after clicking through from search, become a real lever of influence, especially when standard methods have been exhausted.
The Telegram channel @truepf regularly discusses approaches to working with BF, technical aspects of interaction with CrUX, and examples of the influence of user behavior on Google positions. Below is an overview of the technology based on Google's practice and patent base.
What Google records on your site
According to a number of Google patents, ranking takes into account not only the content of the page and links, but also user actions after clicking, various mechanisms for changing positions in the search results based on links, update activity, clicks, etc.
The key role is played by the Click-Through Rate (CTR) indicator - how often users select a site in the search results. If the system records a stable advantage in clickability and a low level of returns to the search, this can be perceived as a signal of high relevance. Such a result should logically be higher.
Additional behavioral signals come directly from the Chrome browser. Google uses data from the official Chrome UX Report system, which collects anonymized statistics on real user interactions with sites. This data is used in Core Web Vitals and, as practice shows, directly affects ranking.
Why not every transition affects SEO
To understand why not all transitions from search are equally useful, you need to understand how exactly Google evaluates visits. The main source of data is CrUX reports, generated from real Chrome browser sessions, including on Android devices.
But getting into CrUX is not easy. In order for a session to be counted by Google as “real” and participate in ranking, the following conditions must match:
- The user is logged in to a Google account and logs in via the Chrome browser on Android.
- The connection is via a mobile network with a real IP of the mobile operator (not a proxy from a data center).
- The site is publicly available and receives enough traffic for Google to generate meaningful statistics.
- The session itself includes real interaction with the site - page views, scrolling, clicks, sufficient dwell time and a low percentage of return back to the search.
Without meeting these conditions, even thousands of clicks will not have any impact on SEO. Google will simply ignore such traffic as suspicious or template.
How to distinguish high-quality PF traffic from useless bots
If you launch behavioral factors or use traffic from third-party services, it is important to immediately understand whether Google takes these transitions from search into account. Otherwise, there is a risk of wasting time and budget.
It is not difficult to check this, but it will take time:
- Take a site that is indexed in Google and is in the search results, but receives almost no transitions.
- Check analytics (Google Analytics and User Report): there is almost no traffic, and this is normal.
- Now open Google PageSpeed Insights, enter the page URL and look at the top block of the report: "Discover what your real users are experiencing". If the site has not received real visits, there will be no data for the last 28 days.
- Run test behavioral visits to the site using a service that can simulate realistic behavior. It is best to choose not the most popular keys so that the result is as clean as possible.
- After 28 days, open the report in PageSpeed Insights again. If the data in the block appears - this means that Google perceived the traffic as the actions of real users.
The appearance of real user data confirms that Google recorded and counted these visits in the ranking. This means that such PF traffic can be effectively used to promote the site.
Google takes into account the entire context of the session: geolocation, connection type, browser and device. Mobile proxies are an important element of reliability in this case. If the IP is issued not by a mobile operator, but by a data center, the entire model may break down and Google will ignore such visits, and your investments will be in vain.
That is why only mobile proxies that provide a realistic session context are professionally used to transmit behavioral signals.
In the Telegram channel @truepf, the team offers cases and working examples where high-quality traffic helps improve positions due to realistic and technically verified sessions that Google actually takes into account in ranking. This is not just an imitation of clicks, but a modeling of the behavior of interested users. If you want to understand more deeply or test the approach on your project - join and ask questions.