Can Analytics boost performance on sites with good bounce rates, etc.?

[CWebguy]

I have a new site that is doing very well as far as bounce rate, etc. It has quality content that users are really finding interesting.

I was thinking that Analytics might give a ranking boost due to the fact that Google must see that users are browsing the site, returning, viewing many pages, etc. Anyone seen any boost in rankings after adding Analytics to a quality site?

[tedster]

No, having a Google Analytics account has no effect on the ranking algorthm. The actions you take from what you learn might help you, though.

If Google were to use visitor behavior data on a site (and that would be a pretty noisy signal to use), they would need some other approach than an Analytics package that is far from universal.

[CWebguy]

In the whole spirit of Web 2.0 and relevancy, I could see them tracking information like this in the future.

[tedster]

This has been the subject of a lot of conjecture recently - particularly the bounce rate metric. Google people have stated that it's a very noisy signal and they don't use it. As is common in such statmeents, they also include the disclaimer that they would not categorically rule out any particular signal and they are always testing various ideas.

In my client work, I see data from a lot of sites. There really is no standard for bounce rate, no benchmark. It makes sense for each individual website to watch how bounce rate is TRENDING, but not to obsess about the hard numbers involved.

Even the same organization may have more than one site with wldely divergent bounce rates across their web properties. I don't personally see how even an army of statisticians could extract meaningful data and use it realistically to compare one website to another.

[wizboy]

When you compare a online shopping website with a news website, surely those have very different bounce rates. However, comparing websites with similar contents, that may not be so bad. I compare ours with our competitors, and these stats seem to be fairly correlated with the quality of the website.

If you notice, in GA, you see that they will compare your site with "other similar sites in the industry". That tells you the Google engineers actually do think that way also.

[pbaddock]

it's noisy .. if Google is doing their indexing and ranking properly and the website is the best it possibly can be then bounce rates should be high.

[aristotle]

I don't see how Google could use Analytics for this purpose because so many sites don't have it. But there have been suggestions that they created their Chrome browser in order to collect information about user behavior, because by using browser data, they could treat all sites equally. My guess is that they are in the testing stage.

[incywincy]

If yours is an informational site and google has done it's job then site visitors will get what they want quickly and move on. This would indicate the website is excellent at delivering information.

[tedster]

Note that Google spokespeople, including Matt Cutts and Adam Lasnik, have said that Google does not use Analytics data - and specifically not bounce rate - in the ranking algo.

A search industry person recently sent me some questions about how bounce rate is done at Google and I was like "Dude, I have no idea about any things like bounce rate. Why don't you talk to this nice Google Analytics evangelist who knows about things like bounce rate?" I just don't even run into people talking about this in my day-to-day life.

Bounce Rate SEO Fallacies [sphinn.com] - Matt Cutts comment on Sphinn