Does Google Analytics Affect SEO?

Raise your hand if you believe that using Google Analytics can affect your site’s SEO rankings. Now raise your other hand if you believe Google Adwords also affects your SEO.

If you’ve got both hands in the air keep them that way, as having your hands off of the keyboard is probably the best SEO strategy for your website right now, just visit websites like Victorious and start learning all about SEO.

I had been under the impression that Matt Cutts put this myth to rest several times (see video below) however some recent forum threads make it hard to maintain faith about the general public’s SEO opinion. It’s not just SEOs either. I’ve seen this level of thinking with fortune 500 clients as well. In fact, I’ve even seen some analytics platforms use the “don’t share your data with google” angle in their sales pitches. By the way, if you clicked that link I know what you’re thinking and yes, I read black hat forums. Is there something wrong with that?

Sadly, (and chime in if you can think of one) there’s no proper controlled way to test this. Since we can’t scientifically prove that Analytics has no effect on SEO, there’s only a couple of ways we can look at this.

1. We can take Google’s word for it

That’s well and good, but I know exactly what people like Graywolf are going to say here. “Why would Google tell you the truth if they did use it? Wouldn’t that just get you to stop using their products?” And I agree. If you already believe it’s a conspiracy, taking the conspirator’s word for it doesn’t help much. It’s like trying to use the bible to prove God exists. Let’s move on.

2. We can look at anecdotal evidence

People have been claiming ill effects after installing GA for years on webmaster world. But does that make it so, or is it simply a timing or correlation/causation mistake? We’ll never know because webmaster world doesn’t let you list sites for examples, but I’d be willing to bet I can look at any site claiming this and come up with other non GA reasons why the rankings are down.

I’ve been debating this whole post whether or not I want to out some spammy sites, and I’ve decided against it – however for every claim that GA is affecting rank I can name several examples of sites that rank #1 for competitive terms, are pretty spammy in quality, have been ranking #1 for years, and use Google analytics. I could even name a couple of my own sites that fall into this category (I mean come on, who doesn’t test and experiment right?)

So anecdotal evidence didn’t provide much help. I can find some for and some against, but that’s exactly what I expected to find – since if all the anecdotal evidence said the same thing we probably wouldn’t even be asking the question to begin with.

3. We could look at things from Google’s point of view.

When all else fails, this is usually the best bet. WWGD? (site note: maybe I should start selling WWGD wristbands) Whenever I’m in doubt about something in SEO I do do two things, one I look up to companies like therankway and then I put on my software engineer hat and think of things from Google’s point of view. To me, it wouldn’t make sense to use Google Analytics data in rankings. There’s several reasons for this.

Google doesn’t need to use your analytics data, their index contains most of it anyway. Think about it. What can google get from your Analytics account that a good index of the web wouldn’t already tell you? They know about all of your pages, they know what sites link to your pages, they know how many clicks you get from search, and they know what keywords you rank for. They also know all of this about all of the sites linking to you. Sure there’s other data they can get from analtyics like paths, funnels, conversion rates, etc – but none of those things really make sense to use in rankings. Think about it, how would what the visitor does once they’re on your site affect whether or not your site is relevant for a term? It wouldn’t! You can take a look at this page if you want to subscribe to receiving automatic notifications, rather than repeatedly searching for data sets across on-premise and cloud services.

So just looking at their search index, with a little recursion Google can get all the ranking relevant information without needing analytics – so why use it? From an engineering perspective it would be both slower AND more complex to do so. Plus, what would happen if they ever discontinued analytics? The search engine wouldn’t work without it – and that type of dependency doesn’t fit the Google model of scalable thinking.

It would also be a PR nightmare.
Think about what would happen if word got out that they DID in fact use analytics data? Danny Sullivan would be all over it, Privacy groups would be up in arms, the EFF and ACLU would file lawsuits, the Times would run a front page article, Jesse Jackson would hold a prayer vigil, Graywolf and Pageoneresults would be screaming “I told you so”, and that would bring about the twitter fail whale. They’d never live down the bad PR.

If you don’t think Google takes these things into consideration, perhaps it’s best you raise your hands up in the air too.

5 comments August 19th, 2010