I've created a post about the probable use of google toolbar and google analytics data for ranking purposes. Here's the URL http://www.searchengine-weblog.com/50226711/seo_prediction_1_the_use_of_google_toolbar_and_google_analytics_data_for_ranking.php What do you think? Will google use it?
I don't think so...There could be a thousand visitors per day at a trashy website, but a high quality one only gets a couple hundred. If Google IS using any analytics information it's probably a tool for them to measure AdSense things with and look for unnatural occurances., but who's to say they are even using the data from one or the other . The day Google Toolbar turns into something like Alexia's is the day I uninstall it .
Yes, there's not enough people that have it installed to give gravity to any findings made from it. The webmaster community obviously have much higher instances of it being used.
This might be like alexa...which shows ranking on the based on data from its toolbar which is not installed everywhere. But one thing I want to add is ....the duration spent and number of visitors on webpage dipicts its resourcefulness and demand, so the page which is visited more and time spend on page is more will get higher reputation and hence high rank.
With the new crawl caching proxy server setup, in which Google now caches any content pulled for adsense, googlebot, etc. I would consider it highly likely that services such as analytics and the toolbar would be used similarly, AND to help rank sites in the algo somehow. They both are capable of sending back data helpful in analyzing websites. How much weight they give the data is the question; I think it would be more helpful for straightening out bugs (like the 302 hijack) than anything.
Toolbar data is used to produce the url snippets shown under the number 1 results for certain searches. Maybe Analytics data is used for this as well but its unlikely.