Smells of rumor. I'd like to hear some other people's input on this, however.

GA has nothing to do with rankings as far as I know, I use it on a few sites and have never had any problems. You may want to look at the way your site is optimized, google's algo is alot different from yahoo and bing so rankings will always be different on each search engine. The only thing that you can do is remove GA to see if this really the reason why you are struggling in google. But again, I don't think it has anything to do with GA.

I don't trust Google with my info either. However, I did use Google analytics for quite some time without any problems.

I will say this though. It's hard for me to see how using Google Analytics is a smart idea when you are trying to "manipulate" their search engine rankings with grey hat (or even white hat) SEO.

Their job is to keep you from doing that.

Personally I think this is bad info (nothing against Gregg). Your rankings don't suffer from using Google Analytics at all, and Google would more likely "slap" you into their sandbox by looking at your backlinks which they already know about without regardless if you're using GA or not.

If you still prescribe to the conspiracy theory, then you can use Yahoo's newer analytic tool, Woopra, or any of the other dozens of tracking tools out there.

I've always used GA and get mixed results in rankings... I'd base that on my ability not GA.

That's good to know. He must really be on to something. Because I use Google Analytics on most of my sites and some how they are still ranking just fine. He must really know his stuff.

Most of these "experts"... are less than qualified to make these statements ... because they are based on nothing.

What possible valid reason would Google have to imply any kind of penalty for feeding them free data? If all the sites were suddenly penalized don't you think that REAL sites who use the service would be falling by the way side?

Analytics is your ticket to figuring out what is working and what is not working and make the necessary adjustments.

If your assertion were true as soon as anyone used Google Analytics all they would see is falling traffic.

Personally i feel safer using and linking my adsense and analytics in all my small websites empire. Safer because i show i have nothing to hide from google. And i don't see any ranking problems. imho.

Not sure if i'm right or wrong. Who knows ....

I can't possibly see a reason why Google would implement something like that. It just doesn't make any sense.

A guy goes in to a fortune teller who tells him that today is his lucky day.

Feeling great, he walks out of the shop and immediately gets hit by a truck.

Days later, recovering in the hospital with two broken legs, he calls the fortune teller and says angrily, "You told me that was supposed to be my lucky day!"

"It was," she says. "If it hadn't been your lucky day you would have been killed."

I'm sure you IM wizards get it.

You rank highly in rankings and you use Google Analytics. How do you know you wouldn't rank higher without them?

Just sayin'.

I just don't see how you can tell one way or the either.

My sites rank fine with GA. Sounds like BS so far. I'll be running a bunch of different tests to confirm though. Loading up about 30 websites before the end of the month so I may get some feedback by the end of next month.