It’s been rumored that the time spent metric is one of the most important indicators used by Google in determining the rank of your site.

It’s supposed to be a complex calculation in which many parameters, weights and indices are taken into consideration. However, we don’t know the exact math for this indicator, in fact, the formula will never be revealed because search engines don’t want people to manipulate the system and cheat.

So we’re going to attempt to simplify the explanation for this indicator as follows:

* The calculation is made over the lifetime of the visitor session to the web page.

* The visitor interactions are tracked by specific engaged events.

* Those events could be: clicking a link, clicking on a picture, downloading a file, watching a YouTube video, commenting in a guest book, emailing content to a friend, printing a page or exiting the site.

* The timestamp for the last interaction determines the time the user spent on your page.

Now of course Google can’t actually measure if you went off and made a cup of tea before leaving the page, but in the course of hundreds of visits they can build up a statistical picture of how long people stay on average. If people stay a long time on your page this is an excellent indicator that they found the information they were looking for: so Google bumps up the Brownie Points for that page.