I am undoubtedly just being paranoid, but I wanted to play with google analytics and set it up on a site of mine where I have ranked #2 for my keyword for years, just behind wikipedia. Just a few days after starting to use GA, I have dropped to #5. Not a massive drop, but a drop none-the-less. Has anyone observed such a correlation? Or should I just stop complaining?
I understand... I guess my question is this: Now that I am using GA, Google knows how much traffic my site gets, what sites are referring, and what frequency, and can theoretically has many new metrics by which to judge the "authoritativeness" off my site - does Google use the GA data as a feed into the algorithms that determine SERP?
Google Does Not Feed Your Analytics Data into SERP Algorithms. But Google uses your data to enhance or add additional features to its products like AdWords, AdSense and other Google products. Recently Google Introduced "Search Volume" metric into its Google Adwords Keyword Tool. You can see Approx Search Volume for Previous month & Avg. Search Volume for a keyword.
I sometimes think the same way.. it won't be impossible for them to do this.. their algo develop overtime.. the problem is.. for right now not all website is using GA so it's hard for them to add new metric based on GA data..
Only Google can answer this and I don't think they are using it at the moment as not all sites use GA. But, you never know if they are using it behind the scene for testing purpose. Anyhow, I don't think the drop is because of GA as my sites are doing okay okay and I use GA on most of them.
Honestly who, other than god and google, know what all adding their code to your website allows them to do. My "Opinion" is that at this moment the only thing it does is add additional code to your site which messes with your code to content ratio and you page load times. I can't say that hurts your ranking because I have not seen evidence of that, however have heard many others say it does. (I doubt that it would cause this big of a drop even if it did.) My suggestion in your situation is to focus more on the sites that jumped you. Specifically, are they doing something differently or better than you? Have they themselves made recent changes and SEO updates that they are now being rewarded for? Also, take a look back to see what you may have done or those have links from and to may have done. It could be an issue of your off page SEO has taken a step backwards and you are now getting bumped back a few spots because of it. Good luck with your site and I wish you best reclaiming your spot.
yep yep , this is very true.Has happened to 2 of my websites from #2 to about 10 on both of them just 3 days after joining. Very sad
I think it's just a speculation but no one except for Google could answer your question in an affirmative manner. They might be using the data but not against you but to enhance their algorithms. Picture this, if Google did use the data against you and were caught doing it, they would all the credibility they have built over the years. I would say that it would be a very price for that bit of data. On top of this it would be unethical.
Why would it be unethical? In the end, Google wants to give to the user the best search results ... Installing GA, should in theory give more insight to Google such as websites run by same webmaster, users bounce rate, time on page, pages visited, etc. Why would Google give us something so cool as Analytics for free? I'm pretty sure they use this insight to give their users a better search engine!
who knows, but personally I am happy to pay a small monthly fee to another analytics provider for this very reason. These guiys are getting a hell of a lot of data all up, I'll keep what traffic details I can to myself.
We use GA on MANY different sites and haven't seen any adverse effects. In fact, we saw one site increase in rankings after adding GA - we didn't think there was any correlation, but maybe... who knows??
I think it can be unethical because what if they use the information against your site, and also, if they get enough data, they could penalize sites a tiny bit automatically if they don't sign up for the google analytics, if they are using the data in any way to boost a site, that means another site is dropping a bit to make up for it.