Sitemaps, and Google Analytics - have they hurt your ranking?

[londrum]

First of all, let me start by saying that Google Sitemaps and Analytics are both great tools and i use them both, but has anyone noticed a drop in rankings after using them?

The reason is ask is this...
say, for example, you have a site with 10,000 pages - but Google has only indexed 5,000 of them. (Maybe the other pages have poor links, or dynamic URLS, which prevent Google from reaching them.)
As far as Google is concerned, the site is only 5,000 pages big.
but if you suddenly tell Sitemaps about 5,000 new pages with no links and no rank of their own, your page rank is now going to be diluted throughout the site.
That means you can expect to see a drop in rank on your other pages. (Although, as i understand it, the overall rank for the entire site will remain steady.)

And Analytics is basically a trumped up version of the Google toolbar, so Google can gauge the frequency of visits, amount of time spent on a page, number of referrers etc. Google obviously needs this data to create a good index, and this is just another way of getting it.

Both tools are very handy and I am a big fan of both (especially as they are free!) but i am starting to think that sometimes it is better NOT to lot Google have access to detailed traffic info about your site whilst it is still growing. After all, you are basically just confirming to them with concrete data that you're getting less traffic than other sites - whereas before they could only infer that from their cookie users.

[treeline]

My traffic and referrals from Google are both up since I started using Analytics. Other site improvements are likely the reason for the increased traffic, but based on the good increase I can't say Analytics has hurt at all.

Haven't tried sitemaps, so can't say on that.

[Tearabite]

has it been verfied that Google uses Analytics data to feed the ranking engine?
I recall seeing posts about people *guessing* that they were using the data - but do we *know* that they are?

[mattg3]

My guess is that it is essentially impossible to ever determine "quality" by an algorithm that does not involve human behaviour patterns. Since they are quite clever at Google I assume they have realised this a while ago.

Hence the conclusion would be that one has to use human behaviour patterns to determine quality [i think it's more popularity], which you will get via analytics and toolbar etc.

G will have already data I assume from SERPS return times (so if someone clicked on the link and returned a second later), but analytics will give them more behaviour patterns. So I would watch for example return visitors in analytics like a hawk..