Question about SEO ranking.

[Spenxr]

Theoretically, if a website has very high traffic - will it automatically have good rankings with google - ect?

If not - does it help to have alot of traffic?

 

[Jay Wessman]

Not necessarily but if it's getting a lot of natural traffic then it's definitely a good sign that it might be ranking well.

If a site is getting tonnes of traffic from natural sources then it means that the site is probably getting shared a lot on social networks and has a lot of people linking to the site both of which help your site to rank well.

Of course if you just have a one page site that isn't optimized for the search engines at all and has no backlinks or anything but is getting a tonne of traffic from say Facebook ads or some other paid traffic source then your website is still going to rank poorly.

 

[Danielle Thompson]

I don't know how you could have a lot of traffic, if you weren't ranking. Unless you're talking about using PPC or something. If you posted something on a blog, and that particular post got you lots of traffic, you would most likely start ranking as a result.

There are spontaneous circumstances where pages attract lots of traffic, and I suppose some could be short lived. But that isn't very common. I have seen lots of traffic come from sites like StumbleUpon, which is great. But didn't last.

But usually if a site is getting lots of organic traffic, it's ranking highly somewhere for something.

It all depends upon where the traffic is coming from.

 

[Legioner]

Yep, traffic from search engines = RANKING SOMEWHERE

 

[tac88]

Not necessarily but if it's getting a lot of natural traffic then it's definitely a good sign that it might be ranking well.

If a site is getting tonnes of traffic from natural sources then it means that the site is probably getting shared a lot on social networks and has a lot of people linking to the site both of which help your site to rank well.

Of course if you just have a one page site that isn't optimized for the search engines at all and has no backlinks or anything but is getting a tonne of traffic from say Facebook ads or some other paid traffic source then your website is still going to rank poorly.

JAY NAILED THIS ANSWER RIGHT ON THE HEAD !
You also could have a few no follow links that do not mean anything to Google but yet you could get a flood of traffic from them.