Like most people with a website, I regularly check the stats to see how things are going: How many people visited today? Where did they come from? How many times have the search engines sent someone my way? These are metrics that I use to know if I'm hitting internal goals, and allow me to alter plans when things head in the wrong direction (If I lose readers, I'll just have to make up some story about Google buying Digg and then duking it out with Microsoft Reddit Live! That sort of thing seems to play very well these days. Don't say I didn't warn you! Of course there's a bit of hypocrisy in the fact that I'm largely speculating about search algorithms, with very limited facts, while criticizing acquisition-of-the-hour rumors).

While the number of visitors has a fairly constant floor, the daily count ceiling can vary wildly if I've posted something new, if someone posted it to reddit or Digg or Slashdot, based upon how many people added things to their http://del.icio.us bookmarks, and so on.

A Wednesday might have 2200 visitors one week, while it sees 15,000 visitors the next.

Search engine referrals, in contrast, are usually fairly constant, with a generally predictable number being sent over, following a recurring weekly curve: Monday = X, Tuesday = X*1.1, Wednesday = X*1.15, Thursday = X*0.75, Friday = X*0.65, Saturday = X*0.4, Sunday = X*0.3. X as been slowly edging up as I add content, and as more inbound links appear and thus PageRank and similar rankings improve.

This week it hasn't been quite as predictable on the search engine front.

After a Sunday drop in search engine referrals, from Google in particular, on Monday Google referrals jumped 50% over the week before. On Tuesday they again jumped 50%. Then on Wednesday they dropped 20% under the mark set the preceding week. Again it came in 20% below on Thursday.

I would write this off as nothing more than normal fluctuations -- maybe users just weren't searching for the sort of content covered on here on Wednesday and Thursday, so the referrals dropped off -- but for the fact that Monday and Tuesday coincidentally also saw a large influx of visitors from Reddit, Digg, Delicious, popurl, and a few other meme sites, quadrupling the normal traffic. Of course these new links were far too fresh to affect the PageRank, so by traditional analysis shouldn't affect the search referrals at all.

This got me thinking, in my normal conspiracy theory way: What if Google has started tying site visits, metered by the Google toolbar (which sends back the sites you're visiting if you have pagerank display on), and has begun using the current values to determine search results?

They could tune this in such a way that a site has to get a certain percentage of non-search referred visitors for each search referral, otherwise the search result is downgraded. The benefit, of course, is that search spam sites that only see visitors courtesy of the search engines would be quickly punished. "Valuable" content that is seeing signficant non-search related traffic would be promoted.

Just some food for thought. I have no proof of this, but I've always felt that there would come a time that their web visit stats would start to influence the search results.