TheMadScientist - 5:30 am on Feb 3, 2013 (gmt 0)

Just to play Devil's advocate for a moment... What if Google used GA as a verification tool rather than an outright ranking tool. For example, if it's algos already "suspected" that a site was good or bad and that site had GA installed, why not look at the traffic to confirm the algo's suspicions?

Why would you target one site when you could use the data across many? I would personally try to not make the mistake of thinking one of the sites I work on is so important Google would target it specifically, but, they could use the behavior patterns of visitors to improve the entire algo and if the behavior pattern of one (or more) of my sites happened to be hit by the 'rule' they wrote, then it would Look like they targeted the site itself.

IOW: When you write an algo to rank 150,000,000+ sites and 1,000,000,000+ pages for 1,000,000,000,000+ searches a year, you don't target any specific site, you look for patterns, because then those patterns apply to any site, page, search in the future too, not only to the site or page they're found on now ... There's a Huge Difference in approach and application ... Quite a few people seem to miss the difference, not necessarily, in my opinion, to their benefit.