Is Google Analytics data a factor in a page's ranking?

What people said

Cites John Conde · 2010-10 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Does Google rate the webpage by amount of visits?”

No. They do not. And your logic is spot on. They don't know how much traffic any sites gets unless it is using Google Analytics which is only a tiny portion of all websites. Traffic is not an indicator of content quality or relevance. It can be easily manipulated. You can have your own bots reload your pages constantly or run an ad campaign that boosts your traffic. Or just trick people in coming to your site. A visit is a visit. It's a self fulfilling prophecy. Sites that rank #1 in Google will get more traffic then the sites below it. As a result it will get more traffic which will help keep it ranked above the other sites. It doesn't take into account how long someone was on a page. If so

Cites DisgruntledGoat · 2010-10 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Does Google rate the webpage by amount of visits?”

Also Matt Cutts answered the Analytics question specifically: [this video] Of course there are other sources of traffic stats like Alexa but it's implied that Google do not use any traffic stats in ranking anyway.

Cites John Conde · 2011-05 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Does a site's bounce rate influence Google rankings?”

To the best of my knowledge, the rankings team does not use bounce rate in any way. — Matt Cutts, June 2010, Search Engine Land interview [LINK] I have an issue with the concept of long/short clicks being used in their ranking algorithm. There are too many scenarios where both short and long clicks occur that are the opposite of what the standard logic would be. For example, short clicks could occur because: A user is opening many tabs at once, let's say all ten links on the first search results page, for research of some kind. (Whether that research is SEO or academic is irrelevant). These will all appear as short clicks. Someone is looking for a particular site and is hopping through resul

Cites Mohammed Ibrahim · 2012-12 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “When is the best time to list a domain name / website in Google Analytics account?”

I think there is no "best time" when it comes to using GA, as it depends on you as a site owner, because you are the only one who can decide when you can actually use the collected data about your traffic and visitors behavior. However there is no harm collecting early stage data which comes before launching the site, they won't held much value but they can easily be ignored and/or totally erased from your account. Anyway, having "goals" to achieve is a good sign for you to start collecting and using GA data. Long story short , there is no " best time " when it comes to collecting data, but " best time " to use that data is when you have some goals to achieve. Another question that came acro

Cites DisgruntledGoat · 2013-05 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “How does Google know how much traffic a website gets?”

First, let's clear up a misconception in the other answers: Google search does not use Google Analytics in any way for ranking . Matt Cutts at Google confirmed this years ago [this video] . And if you think about it logically, for the most part it does not make sense for them to use that data for two reasons: (1) most sites get most of their traffic from Google, so looking at their GA stats is meaningless; (2) it would definitely be seen as an anti-competitive and monopolistic move (forcing all sites to use GA in order to get good rankings in Google search). They may use some other sources like Joshak suggested, but many of those would fall into category 2 above. In reality, they don't need to kn

Cites Max · 2014-02 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Can adverts on your site actually help SEO?”

Your understanding of how Google ranks pages could be incorrect. Many people speculate that Google uses bounce rate [LINK] as a ranking factory, however Matt Cutts, head of web spam at Google, has denied this on various occasions: Is Bounce Rate a Signal in Determining What Content May be Spam? No. Cutts said the Google web spam team doesn’t use Google Analytics data. It’s not a bad thing when someone finds their answer right away and bounces, he said. Matt Cutts Talks Google Penguin, Negative SEO, Disavowing Links, Bounce Rate & More [LINK] “Google doesn’t use bounce rate” @mattcutts Matt Cutts: Google Doesn’t Use Bounce Rate [LINK] Video: Is Google Analytics data a factor in a page's ranki

Cites Stephen Ostermiller · 2014-10 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Does the time a user spend on your site affect your Google ranking?”

The amount of time that users spend on your site after clicking on a webinar link that has been sent to them via email will in no way change your Google rankings. Here is a video by Google's Matt Cutts [this video] where he addresses whether or not Google uses Google Analytics data as a ranking factor. The answer is "no". Google does care about the experience its users have after clicking to your site from the Google search results. If Google sees that many users are bouncing back to the results and looking for other sites, your rankings will fall. Google does measure the time spent on your site between clicking on a search result, and using the back button to the Google search results. Google do

Cites DisgruntledGoat · 2016-01 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Does when configuring a new Google Analytics account from the old impact search engine optimization?”

Google Analytics has no effect on SEO at all, as confirmed by Google multiple times ( example [this video] ). Regarding Webmaster Tools: if you set up a new GA account then yes, you will need to link the new account with your existing GWT account if you have one. As far as I know there are no ramifications from doing this.

Cites Raul Reyes · 2018-01 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Not use Google Analytics could penalize page rank in Google Search?”

Google collects users behavioral data independently of websites having Google Analytics installed. Types of user behavior data used by Google include click-through rate (CTR), navigational paths, time, duration, and frequency. The way they do this is by tracking users behavior on each set of organic search results in the same way they do with paid ads, in simple words, they basically store in a database data associated with the use of all the links appearing in SERPs. Search engines also weigh the probability of a link being clicked in relation to its position and how this influences further user’s behavior on those websites a user visits, becoming arguably an essential part of how the algor