I heard a strange story yesterday, somebody told me Google uses analytics data of websites data also for serps? For example if my site has a very high bounce rate it could hurt my positions. Is this true?
I'm interested to hear what other people think. My opinion (since I have no facts) is that Google does not do this. Why? Google wants you using their analytics. They want everything you do on the web to be through Google because the longer your eyeballs are staring at a Google page the more money they make. If you used an analytics service provided by another search engine, chances are you'd also search the internet with them, which makes Google lose money. If Google did base your ranking off of your analytics data, nobody would use them. Now, bounce rate might very well affect your ranking, but if it does I would imagine it would have to be in a way that affects all sites, whether they have analytics installed or not, and I don't know if that is even possible. If there was a conspiracy theory around analytics I would think that it would be that Google favors those sites using their services, not the other way around.
Also, if your bounce rate it high it could be indicating poor content or that you're not targeting appropriate keywords, in which case you will naturally slip in the ranking and you should. If the majority of people who come to your site don't stick around because it's not what they're looking for, then Google would be a bad search engine if they kept your page highly ranked.
I believe google can measure bounce rate to a certain extent using methods other than analytics. I would guess that they do include this in the algo but it isn't data from analytics that is used.
yes, it is true.... If your bounce-rate is very high, it indirectly affects your ranking positions. Concentrate more on pages which are filled with errors and page under construction
Yes it is true. Google is now turning and seeing user interest. If bounce rate is high, user interest is less. If a website attracts very less users then no point is there is showing your website up in serps. Right?
This is something we can discuss about. You're right only if the landing page is the same every time or most of the time. But, for example, I own a website which has a bounce rate of 85%. It is a lyrics website from my sig. I'm not penalized by G, and the website is doing very well. The landing page differs every time. User searches some lyrics in Google, they discover my link, grab the lyrics and close the page or clicks an ad.
Logically its true. If a page having high amount of bounce rate is simply indicating that user do not want to land on. And Google will not serve the things that user is not interested on. So bounce rate will defintely somewhere affect in the ranking but not sure Google has to rely on Google analytics for such data or not.
Google is highly unlikely to be using Analytics data to determine rankings, nor is it feasible that bounce rates have some weight to pull.
Using Bounce rates to determine SERP and using complete analytics to hurt the position is different thing. Yes bounce rates do affect as Google wants relevant results and if your website is not user friendly or relevant to the keywords Google won't let your website rank well so yes bounce rate does affect in SERP. But google don't use analytics to hurt our ranking
High bounce rate can also mean that the user is looking for info, finds exactly what he's looking for on the page, reads it and then leaves again. You could only measure that by measuring the time the user leaves the page open to read it and not by the fact if he clicks on one of the links to jump to another page.
If you have Google Analytics installed, Google most likely uses that information to see how many people visit your website and what is the bounce rate. The more people visit your site and the more pages those people view and spend time on, the higher up the SERPs your website will be placed which makes sense. I'm just not sure how they would find this information if you did not have Google Analytics installed.
I am sure noticing it with different sites. The sites where i have a high bounce rate starting to drop in the serps. On the other hand, sites where i have a very low bounce rate and a high ctr i'm getting higher rankings.
Analytics shows you what Google records. Your bounce rates have nothing to do with SERPs, or atleast I hope so
I always thought the way you do, but i'm experiencing changes in serp's on pages that have a high and low bounce rate. I'm creating a tool that can make a nice graph where i can see the major changes. If i have more data i will let it know.