What pogo-sticking looks like
Someone searches, clicks a result, realizes it does not answer the question, returns to the search results, and clicks a different result. That back-and-forth movement is pogo-sticking.
It is not the same as bounce rate. A visitor can leave a page without returning to Google, and a short visit can be successful — checking a phone number or definition may take only seconds.
What Google said
In 2018, Google's John Mueller said site owners should not worry about pogo-sticking as a ranking signal for individual pages. He argued that people return to search results for many reasons, so the behavior is difficult to interpret reliably. Search Engine Journal documented the exchange.
What the Google leak revealed
The 2024 leak of internal Google API documentation complicated that answer. It exposed fields
called goodClicks, badClicks, and lastLongestClicks, along with processed and unprocessed
click counts, in data connected to Navboost. Google later confirmed the documents were
authentic,
while warning that they were incomplete and could be outdated or misunderstood.
Court evidence is the other important piece. Testimony and exhibits in the US antitrust case describe Navboost as a ranking system that records clicks and learns from aggregated user behavior. The plaintiffs' findings cite Google testimony that it retained 13 months of click data.
The careful conclusion is not that one quick return automatically hurts one page. The leak does not disclose the fields' exact definitions, thresholds, weights, or current production use. Together with the court record, however, it is strong evidence that Google distinguishes among types of clicks and uses aggregated click behavior in search ranking.
Good clicks and bad clicks
The names suggest a satisfaction model:
- A good click appears to be one that indicates the result met the searcher's need.
- A bad click appears to be one that indicates dissatisfaction, such as returning and trying another result.
- A last longest click appears to identify the result where a searcher finally spent the most time.
Those are reasonable interpretations, not definitions published by Google. There is no verified number of seconds that turns a bad click into a good one.
The practical response is simple: match the search intent, make the title accurately describe the page, answer the main question early, and remove anything that slows the visitor down. Optimize for a satisfied reader, not an invented dwell-time target.
Read the deeper analysis in our blog post covering the matter.