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Traffic Improves SEO and Affects Google Rankings






cognitiveSEO article posted on Reddit


2. The Huge Referral Traffic Spike on cognitiveSEO



On average, the users that day spent about 9 seconds on our landing pages. But before we sink into the pool of “youth-these-days” disappointment, remember that averages are statistical tools which can easily deceive. In this particular case, the average is a relative measurement which sometimes blurs the facts: it is likely that the absolute number of people who spent a really long amount of time on our page was still as high as (if not higher than) on any other day. Their numbers simply got cancelled out in the sea of users who clicked and bailed in just a couple of seconds.



Reddit Trafic Spike cognitiveseo


3. The Increased Traffic – Statistics for the cognitiveSEO Blog

So what exactly happened to so many users that felt the need to leave the page as soon as they got there? Because the bounce rate was at an all-time high (96.19%), meaning that a vast majority just clicked, glanced and left in a hurry, just like you can see in the chart below.

Ultra High Bounce Rate

Accidental clicks (followed, naturally, by hurried departures) are probably responsible for a large portion of the bounces, but surely they can’t all have been accidents? The profile of the reddit user is also something to take into account at this point. They are likely avid readers, parsing through pieces of content in rapid succession without necessarily scanning the title in-depth before clicking on it and only deciding on whether they want to read it or not just seconds after the page has loaded.


Another scenario to consider is that Reddit is first and foremost a community and its users are primarily preoccupied with interaction (even when it’s for the purpose of finding out information). Comments section are a lot of times the actual prized content and not just a redundant annex to the quality content. Use this situation as an example to look out in your content marketing strategy. 


It is then not unthinkable that while most people who would comment on the topic would want to read the blog post, there was at least a considerable number of those who were more interested in the comments than in the article itself. There are probably a lot of other factors at work here to explain the staggering bounce rate. Despite all the bounces, however, the mere presence of so many visitors in so little time led to an even more impressive effect.

Very Low Session Duration

As expected and  presented above, the average session duration was very low. Yet, as the increased website traffic went away, the average session duration increased. This means that our usual readers platform maintained their behavior and after all the buzz in our site’s traffic, things got back to normal.


4. The Keyword Ranking Improvement on Ultra Competitive Keywords




cognitiveSEO Rank Tracking Traffic Spike


cognitiveSEO Huge SEO Visibility Spike




GWT Big Spike Impressions


5. Did The Huge Amount of Referral Traffic Affected Our Google Rankings? – Data Correlation

Our 15 minutes of fame lasted a bit more, but not by a lot. Everything happened on the 5th, as the organic traffic spike confirms. You can see this yourself, in the screenshot below, taken from Google Analytics.

cognitiveSEO Organic Traffic Spike Due to Referral Traffic

As more and more people saw the thread, up-voted it and commented on it, the post got pushed higher and higher and started to attract even more views and comments. Soon enough, it was all a matter of the rich getting richer. As with most threads on reddit, the buzz eventually died out and other posts took turns at the popularity contest.



Can traffic increases influence the keyword ranking positions in the SERPs ? It looks like it could be.

Yet, the author also stresses on the importance of concentrating more on obtaining links from webpages that can convert traffic rather than looking at the outdated metric of PageRank for example. So, concentrating on obtaining quality traffic, from social media or not, is crucial and you can monitor that traffic using free tools Google Analytics. Nevertheless, we cannot ignore  the benefit of referral traffic in terms of how it impact SEO rankings within Google.


As in our case, it seems like obtaining links that provide a high volume of referrals and  click through data impact search rankings within search engines. We cannot draw a 100% certified conclusion here but we can assume, having our own experience as a starting point that referral traffic may influence Google search rankings. More research needs to be done on this matter  in the future (and we are probably going to make an analysis of this kind in the near future) but I think that our findings on this situation is one that needs to be exploited and one from which there are a lot of lesson to be learnt.


Of course, this whole analysis is basically trying to establish a cause-effect relationship between two elements : the referral traffic and the SEO rankings. The basic conditions seem to be meet: one happened before the other, there was a co-variation in one that corresponded to a co-variation in the other and the two are relevant to each other. However, we have ignored one additional criterion of a causal relationship: that there are no alternative causes that could lead to the same effect.


Also, I don’t think that the brand awareness generated via the Reddit link could have led to these increased SEO rankings. The moment the organic ranking improvement happened correlates directly to the time of Reddit posting.



Could only one referring domain cause such a spike in rankings and in only a couple of hours since it was published?


One Referring Domain Reddit Organic Boost

We picked up some of the Reddit Links and analyzed them in order to see if the scenario where one domain could have boosted up so high was possible. As we browsed around the links we observed that indeed, most of them were links with good domain authority, yet, nofollow.






As another personal experience in inbound marketing, I noticed that social media traffic boosted some of our other posts when people started to share them more aggressively.


There are lot of things to discuss here and as listening to others’ opinions and analyze them is one of a researcher’s best skill, we would be more than happy if you  shared your opinion on this matter. So, what do you think?


Does referral traffic influence SEO rankings? Or can only one referring domain boost a site’s rankings from a low position to a top position in only a couple of hours?


Is external traffic a Google ranking factor? Could this be an SEO technique that can be scaled?


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