Continuous (infinite) scrolling and Google search results
Continuous scrolling, also known as infinite scrolling, is a way of displaying content without forcing the site visitor to click on a link to another page.
It’s a seamless way to present the user with what they want to see, without putting them through the largely superfluous action of clicking a link to view a new page.
It’s a particularly good user experience in situations where a site visitor is searching for content.
The infinite scrolling app is wildly successful in the context of social media.
It can be argued that it is also appropriate for search results.
How do you measure an impression in a continuous scroll?
The person who asked the question noted that their agency employees disagreed with opinions of what constituted an impression in search results displayed in a continuous scrolling format.
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This is the question:
“My question is… hotly debated at my agency. It’s all about impressions.
So can you tell us what an impression ranks in Google Search Console (GSC) and how it might be changing with infinite scrolling? «
John Mueller from Google responded:
“Okay… there’s a lot about it.
We have a Help Center page on impressions, clicks, and positions (I think it’s called roughly) that has a ton of detail on those impressions.
That is something I would look at first. It’s something I usually look at when I get this question. So that would be my recommendation in the first place.
Regarding the infinite scrolling or the type of continuous scrolling setup we are testing… I think it’s a bit tricky because it’s hard to determine exactly what is happening from an SEO point of view.
Loading search results in groups of ten
John Mueller said that while from a user point of view it is continuous scrolling, from Google’s point of view it is still just groups of ten search results.
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Mueller explained:
“But essentially, for our part, we are still loading the search results in Groups of 10…
And as a user scrolls down the page, we dynamically load the next set of ten results there.
And when that set of ten results is loaded, that counts as one impression.
Basically that means that kind of scrolling down and you start to see page two of the search results, what we’d see is like, well, this is page two now and now it has similar impressions to if someone just clicked on the page two. directly on the links.
So, from that point of view, there are not many changes there.
Impressions may increase, but clicks may remain static
Mueller then offered what appears to be his opinion that little will change and that the number of clicks will mostly remain the same.
It is not unreasonable to think that if Google makes it easier to get to page two of the search engine results pages (SERP), there could be a small increase in the number of people who find what they are looking for.
But Mueller, whose opinion is well-informed, shared the view that that’s not the case.
Here’s Mueller’s take:
“What I think will change a bit is that users will probably scroll a little easier to page two, page three or four.
And based on that, the number of impressions a website can get in search results will probably go up a bit.
I don’t think it’s like an extreme change, but it will probably be the case, more so, that if you were ranking on page
two and all of a sudden your website gets a lot more impressions just because it’s easier to get to page two on search results.And the number of clicks I suspect will remain similar because people will like to scroll up and down and look at the results on a page and click on one of them.
So what will probably happen is that the prints go up a bit.
Clicks stay the same, which means the click-through rate tends to go down a bit.
And… if you are exclusively focusing on click-through rate, for SEO, I suspect it will be a bit of a… weird situation because it’s hard to determine if the click-through rate dropped because this page was displayed in this scrolling environment?
Or was it shortened because users saw it but didn’t like clicking it so much anymore.
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Click-through rate (CTR) percentage metric
In the end, John Mueller raised the interesting question of the CTR drop and possible opacity when trying to diagnose the reasons for it.