An opinion of many is by faking the organic click though rate of a website, it will give the appearance of being more popular than it is. By employing real people or using an automated bot through an online service or software, the amount of clicks per presentation of website within search or on social media can be increased. This so called black hat strategy has been used by a few for several years now.
It is very true that Google will reward the more popular websites with better rankings, should there be better engagement signals with the websites visitors, but is it enough just to measure the CTR or Click through Rate?
I have done several experiments on this subject of organic CTR Manipulation and my opinion is that fake CTR does not help SEO or give better rankings. When this is measured as a stand alone metric, I can find no evidence that rankings will improve. I have even tested using CTR to improve crawl quotas, again with no success.
However, when someone visits a website and then stays to read the content, or watch the videos or scroll though many pages, and leave positive engagement signals to Google, then this is when I believe a positive impact can be made on rankings.
So fake CTR in my opinion does not work, but fake visitors to a website, say by employed micro workers, or a group of individuals put together to share visitors experience can. It is the positive engagement metrics that improve the rankings not the click through rate.
Click Through Rate Versus Engagement
Therefore, many SEO professionals who state that Fake CTR does work, tend do not separate the positive engagement signals that a micro worker may apply to that website when visiting from the actual click through rate, they see the whole process as one.
So, if you are going to employ micro workers to visit your website, you need to see a very specific criteria to what pages they should visit, how long their visit should be and other mouse actions that give the impression of engagement to Google. This can be harder than you think.
A factor also considered by Google, is the different IP addresses each engagement is from. One person cannot just visit the same website 100 times a day and expect Google to see this as a popular website. There needs to be several people from several locations and IP addresses, different devices, mobile and desktop as well as different browsers, operating systems, windows, android and IOS etc.
If you want to improve rankings in the UK, having traffic from Malaysia or India may not help as much as you think. or at all.
This is why you may hear the term Micro workers in plural rather than a single individual. There are so many boxes to tick to truly fool Google and for clicks to look genuine rather than fake.
For me, sending genuine traffic to your site is a more productive process. For example, Google and Facebook adds, twitter and other social media. These are real people who have clicked on the add, in response to a specific question or answer they are looking for. If your website is set up well and engaging, then this will deliver normal positive engagement signals. The cost, although not cheap in my opinion could be no more than any fake CTR services out there.
