Popular Marketing Posts
Does Clicking On Your Own Website Improve Your Rankings?
For years (if not decades), people have been trying to get one over on Google by any means possible. One of the oldest and most contentious tricks in the book is to attempt to trick Google into boosting your rankings by repeatedly clicking on your own link in the search results.
It’s a theory that stems from the equally sketchy suggestion that the more clicks you get, the higher you climb in the rankings. That there is some kind of direct correlation between this kind of click data and SERP performance, meaning that giving yourself a ton of clicks might work in your favour.
It won’t – Google has stated on countless occasions that click data never has been and never will be used for ranking purposes.
But at least in this instance, the question posed by an SEO on the topic wasn’t completely inane. Rather than querying the potential benefits of habitual and relentless self-clicking, they wanted to know whether it was a practice that could lead to a Google penalty.
For example, if you were to manually click on your own result thousands of times (or use a bot to do so), would it actually harm your SERP placement?
The answer, once again, is a clear frank...no.
No Positive or Negative Impact
The SEO in question quizzed Google’s John Mueller on Twitter, presenting the following query:
“have a question regarding Google ranking algorithm. Is it a penalty if multiple employees from the same company search Google for the same keyword every day at the same time and click on our site in order to improve their Google search ranking?”
To which, Mr Mueller offered the following response:
“It seems like a weird thing for people to do at a company, but it's not that I don't do anything weird myself. I can't imagine how that would have any impact.”
Seeking further clarification, the SEO continued the conversation as follows:
“So, this kind of action is not a penalty, but on the contrary, there is no positive impact of improving search rankings, right?”
Mr Mueller then replied:
“That's correct, I can't think of any effect it would have in Search.”
What this means is while giving yourself all the artificial clicks in the world won’t work in your favour, it also won’t have a negative impact on your SEO performance. This stands to reason, as if it really was this easy to get one over on Google, we’d all be doing it by now.
The whole thing echoes a question posted on Reddit a while back, when a website owner asked the following:
“Hypothetical Question: What is stopping me from making a bot to improve my search rankings?”
To which, Mr Mueller stepped in and provided the following response:
"It makes no sense, but knock yourself out."