They should…shouldn’t they? If a site has a high CTR (Click Through Rate) and a high traffic in general (possibly tracked through Google Toolbar), it’s reasonable to assume that they’ll have quality content. Google has all the insights it needs about the sites that use google analytics for analyzing their traffic.
Apparently, not a lot of information is available about this. It is being discussed by SEO experts, but it is still seen as a future trend, currently in experimentation phase.
Of course, the problem with this approach might be that it can be pretty difficult to compare user experience and user intent with just parameters like CTR and avg. time on page.
The normalization needed for a fair comparison is extremely difficult…if you use a very catchy title and description…(Think “Top 10 ways to write a-b-c-d!”), you’ll surely get more traffic…but what if a user gets frustrated after looking at the page? Even for time-on-site (to be tracked through Google toolbar), normalization is very difficult…if your site is very easy to use, you’ll quickly find something and exit…so, higher time on page might not always be sign of a better site!
As Bradley says here, what we can do any way, is create interesting titles and descriptions, with a balance between keywords and making them unique. Easier said than done of course!
Here is a podcast that discusses the same issue. May be Google might do something like a Digg button on organic search results to leverage power of community more than they currently do. That might be a better measure than just a CTR. Of course, there would be spam in this too…this feature is currently in experimental stage…what do you think about it? Digg, Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon and other social bookmarking sites have created a whole new genre of finding interesting stuff on internet. One thing is certain…if Google does implement this feature full fledged, that will be a whole new segment in the SEO world!
