Google Says to Diversify Traffic; Does It Matter For Rankings?

As the platforms evolve their business models and as we start to see a potential—and probable—decrease in traffic, finding new sources of traffic is incredibly important. This is why questions like I asked a few weeks ago regarding Apple News and whether it’s dependable is something many publishers are trying to answer right now.

And so, whenever we get feedback from a platform, especially one as profound as Google, people pay attention. Earlier this week, Danny Sullivan, Google’s search liaison, tweeted a number of times through the official Google SearchLiaison account about what he felt was the appropriate action for publishers to take.

One person went back and forth a few times and she asked:

Can you please tell me if I’m doing right by focusing on my site and content – writing new articles to be found through search – or if I should be focusing on some off-site effort related to building a readership? It’s frustrating to see traffic go down the more effort I put in.

It’s easy to get lost in the thread with many people complaining about how Google’s recent algorithmic updates have fundamentally destroyed their businesses. “Why won’t Google help us?” one reader asked. Everyone is desperately searching, hoping to find some sort of a solution for their massive drops in traffic. And in many respects, it’s small publishers that have been disproportionately affected.

So, what did Sullivan have to say? He wrote:

As I’ve said before, I think everyone should focus on doing whatever they think is best for their readers. I know it can be confusing when people get lots of advice from different places, and then they also hear about all these things Google is supposedly doing, or not doing, and really they just want to focus on content. If you’re lost, again, focus on that. That is your touchstone.

…

Great sites with content that people like receive traffic in many ways. People go to them directly. They come via email referrals. They arrive via links from other sites. They get social media mentions.

One thing wasn’t clear, though. Should publishers be looking to get traffic in a variety of ways because it’s what makes a great website or is it because there is a ranking effect? In other words, if sites can get traffic from email, social, other referring sites, etc., does that mean Google will give them a boost in the rankings because of this traffic diversity?

I decided to ask my friend and SEO expert, Mike King, founder of iPullRank. It helps to clarify the conversation. A few weeks ago, Google’s internal engineering documentation for search was leaked. In other words, all the stuff that goes into how the rankings work was suddenly made public. And Mike went through a ton of them in an in-depth blog post.

A big trend emerged. Many of the things that Google says it doesn’t do, it actually does. As Mike wrote, “I won’t go as far as calling it “social engineering” because of the loaded history of that term. Let’s instead go with… ‘gaslighting.’” Is domain authority real? Google says no, but the leaked documents say otherwise. Do clicks impact rankings? Google says no, but the leaked documents say otherwise. And the list goes on.

With that context, I wanted to understand if Google was pushing a diversification narrative to support rankings. What he said confirmed my suspicions:

There is evidence that they are collecting data via Chrome. It’s possible they could be using those signals as an engagement metric, but I did not see anything specifically to indicate that in the documentation. However, it makes sense that they’d be looking to understand where people after they leave a result as a function of understanding the success of a session.

To be clear, there is no indication that they use Google Analytics or anything like that. There is an indication that they do collect traffic to pages via Chrome.

Let’s break that down. For all Chrome users, Google is able to track how people react to specific websites. Hit the site and immediately bounce? Not helpful. Hit the site and spend a lot of time there? Helpful. However, he wasn’t able to find any evidence to suggest that it immediately impacts rankings. And so, if Chrome activity isn’t showing up in the rankings, diversity of traffic also wouldn’t show up in the rankings.

In other words, suspicion confirmed: “I think Danny is just saying don’t be overly-reliant on Google,” he ultimately concluded.

And this is why diversity of traffic matters. Why are the biggest brand sites ranking so competitively? In some part, Google is rewarding the bigger players. That’s obvious. The big keep getting bigger. The other part is because these bigger sites get traffic from all over the place. They may rely heavily on Google, but they also invest in social and have brands strong enough that maybe someone’s grandma is typing in the website straight in her browser—or clicking on a bookmark.

As publishers, we need to figure out how to expand the places that we get traffic. Google was a great source for a long time—and, in many respects, still is. However, being dependent and building your entire business on Google rankings is a horrible idea. Brand matters. Referrals matter. Paid even matters. Diversifying where your traffic comes from is incredibly important to building a sustainable business.

But it’s what happens after the traffic hits your site that really matters. I firmly believe that publishers overemphasize monetizing the first pageview rather than focusing on providing a user experience and calls to action that can convert traffic from flyby to known. And I understand why publishers were doing this. They were living with an abundant mindset. “Oh, I didn’t convert this user? That’s okay, I’ll get the next one. And the tens or hundreds of thousands of others.”

Unfortunately, we need to move out of an abundance mindset when it comes to traffic to our sites. Every visitor that hits the page must be thought of as a prospective customer, someone who can become a long-term reader. That’s why, even with the recent worry regarding Apple’s new tabbed email folder structure, having a newsletter should still be the north star. An email powers everything.

Diversity of traffic absolutely matters for publishers. It is not directly related to rankings. This is an example of correlation, not causation. The sites that are most likely to rank also happen to receive traffic from a variety of sources. However, this does not discount the fact that Google is gaslighting publishers big and small, as Mike shows in his breakdown with plenty of examples.