Comment by Saline9515
9 months ago
Your way of browsing the web isn't what most users do. Most users click on the first link. Many of them don't know what reference websites are. A Spanish woman in her 20s has no idea what the wirecutter is.
9 months ago
Your way of browsing the web isn't what most users do. Most users click on the first link. Many of them don't know what reference websites are. A Spanish woman in her 20s has no idea what the wirecutter is.
First of all, users are more sophisticated than you think. And why you're bringing nationalities into this, I have no idea. And obviously Google isn't going to be surfacing English content like Wirecutter in Spain -- it will surface well-known publications in Spain.
But secondly, even if you were right, it wouldn't matter. Users who click on the first link for everything don't change the relative clickthrough rates. The people who actively choose which links to click on would still be the ones influencing the ranking. Google is smart enough to control for clickthrough rates by their listing in results and knowing how far the user has scrolled.
I've had the opportunity to analyze click behavior for some pages, and there's a huge bias for people to click things at the top.
Let's say for example 90% of users are unsophisticated and 10% are sophisticated. Even if the #2 link is preferred 100% of the time by sophisticated users, you're still going to see 90% of people clicking the first link.
But in your example, Google would almost immediately learn that sophisticated users click on the current #2 link, and then make that the #1 link for everyone. It's really easy to do statistically. The bias for the top link gets removed, that's always the first step.
Unsophisticated users are not negatively affecting the quality of results.
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