As every SEO knows, this question is not a new one, it’s been around as long as GA has been around. And we all know that Google has always insisted that they do not use GA data to help them determine if [your site] should rank higher or lower for a given keywords. And to cut to the chase, this article basically makes the point that it’s easy to prove the answer to this this question one way or the other. Just take a bunch of sites that are ranking well in Google and see if any of them are not using the GA tag.
When you do that, you can see that plenty of websites are ranking highly for top keywords such as Wikipedia (one of my least favorite sits as well as aHrefs (one of my favorite tools).
However, the article does bring up this snippet from Google that is quite interesting:
“Beyond simple keyword matching, Google says, We also use aggregated and anonymized interaction data to assess whether search results are relevant to queries. We transform that data into signals that help our machine-learned systems better estimate relevance.”
Drilling-in further into this, first, from a philosophical perspective we have to ask ourselves, why would a for profit company build a tool (the best tool mind you) and give that tool away for free? This is not a cheap thing to do. They had to hire engineers, keep the software updated and relevant not to mention store trillions of gigs of data and they did that all, for free, out of the goodness of their heart?
Of course not, they did it for the data. And it was a brilliant strategy. Now why did they do that? And how are they using that data? Well, it says it right there, they are taking the data, and anonymizing it (that means they remove all the personal information and any info that ties the data to a specific website). They then aggregate or combine all the data and from there they would have clean data that shows them the paths from a keyword search to content signals which I’m sure is what they used to train their AI to better estimate relevance.
This is how Googlers like John Muller and Matt Cutts can say with a strait face, that Google Analytics data does not help [your site] rank in Google, but in the same breath they can imply that [your data] is used to help train their algorithms to better understand the relationship between a keyword query and how satisfied a user might have been who read your content.
The question – “Is Google Analytics or using GA being used to help Google Search Rank your site better?”
Our Verdict: Google Analytics Is Not A Ranking Factor. However, Google Analytics is data is used by the Google Search team to train their algorithm to better understand the relationships between keyword searches and the user data at a non-personal and aggregated view and the content that search query ranks for.
Read more from the source Search Engine Journal: Is Using Google Analytics A Search Ranking Factor?, Published by: Kayle Larkin …