Google Analytics & Rankings
If I didn’t know better I’d say that data from Google Analytics affects your rankings but I do know better because Matt Cutts told me so. They don’t. There is a bit of suspicion and controversy around this subject. The ramifications of Google intentionally using that data in their algorithm could have many unintended consequences, the most immediate of which could be site owners trying to artificially manipulate their stats if they found out. That would be a huge headache for the webspam team. For that reason alone, I believe that your analytics data is safe from the algorithm team. Today however in filming my vlog, I realised that Google had seen some sort of signal from the social networks and ranked our post high for “download ios 5” and related phrases. That is a pretty competitive phrase when you consider the amount of press around it.
Google doesn’t index Twitter
We know Google doesn’t index Twitter anymore. Just before they launched their own potential competitor Google+, they decided not to renew their licensing agreement with Twitter to index a live feed. I’ve just searched a couple of my tweets from today and they are not in the index. As the majority of inbound links we had were from Twitter and Google doesn’t index Twitter, what made it rank on the front page? Why was it important enough to rank above other pages for a competitive phrase? In today’s vid, I let slip that Google must be using Analytics data to decide that if a page is all of a sudden popular and getting a spike in traffic, then that becomes a ranking signal. Google denies this and I believe them. Although as quickly as the spike in traffic dropped away, so did our rankings for that page. There are a range of other factors though which I’ll be looking at in the coming weeks. In the meantime enjoy today’s show. Below is the Google vid about Analytics & ranking. Love to know what you think.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
