What is Pogo Sticking?

When users enter the web page through the SERP and then immediately exit and click on other results, it is called pogo sticking.

Is Pogo Sticking a Ranking Factor?

Pogo sticking is not a ranking factor.

There is a question at Office-hours to John Mueller about Pogo Sticking.

Guest Question:

If we’ve got some legacy content, old content that maybe we’ve neglected, could have been focusing our efforts elsewhere, and the user clicks on that, has a poor experience, and clicks back to the search, that’s obviously bad for us. Is that something that would affect that page only, or would it have an effect on the rest of the website?

John Mueller:

We try not to use signals like that when it comes to the search. So that’s something where there’s lots of reasons why users might go back and forth or look at different things in the search results, or stay just briefly on a page and move back again. That’s something that’s really hard to refine and say, well, we can’t turn this into a ranking factor. So I would not worry about things like that.

John Mueller explains Google does not use signal user behavior as users stay on the page for a short time, move back again, and click another result. So, we can say pogo sticking is not a ranking factor.