Uninstalled Google Analytics and poof!...My site jumped 2 rankings?

13 years ago

I would be extremely surprised if Google Analytics had anything to do with it. Really, all Google Analytics does is allows you to monitor traffic that's already coming to your site. Google wants you to use their products and it would be pretty stupid for them to penalize you for using them.

You said you were doing other things at the time. Maybe those things helped you out.

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Cataclysm1987

13 years ago

Originally Posted by TheFreebieGuy

I would be extremely surprised if Google Analytics had anything to do with it. Really, all Google Analytics does is allows you to monitor traffic that's already coming to your site. Google wants you to use their products and it would be pretty stupid for them to penalize you for using them.

You said you were doing other things at the time. Maybe those things helped you out.

True, but it also says in the terms of use for GA that Google has the right to use the data in your account for any purpose it wants.

I've heard guys like Greg Jacobs say it is one of the worst things you can do to have it on a money site.

Albeit Greg Jacobs is the creator of WP Mage, which is a pretty grey hat marketing system, but still, there is a lot that Google can do with your data.

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Jacob Martus

13 years ago

It's nothing but a coincedence. That would be like me saying, "I put my left shoe on first instead of my right shoe and my rankings went up".

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Cataclysm1987

13 years ago

From GA terms of use:

""This website uses Google Analytics, a web analytics service provided by Google, Inc. ("Google"). Google Analytics uses "cookies", which are text files placed on your computer, to help the website analyze how users use the site. The information generated by the cookie about your use of the website (including your IP address) will be transmitted to and stored by Google on servers in the United States . Google will use this information for the purpose of evaluating your use of the website, compiling reports on website activity for website operators and providing other services relating to website activity and internet usage. Google may also transfer this information to third parties where required to do so by law, or where such third parties process the information on Google's behalf. Google will not associate your IP address with any other data held by Google. You may refuse the use of cookies by selecting the appropriate settings on your browser, however please note that if you do this you may not be able to use the full functionality of this website. By using this website, you consent to the processing of data about you by Google in the manner and for the purposes set out above.""

What you say would make sense if not for the fact that Google basically openly admits to using this information for anything they want.

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Jacob Martus

13 years ago

Originally Posted by Cataclysm1987

Google will use this information for the purpose of evaluating your use of the website, compiling reports on website activity for website operators and providing other services relating to website activity and internet usage.

What you say would make sense if not for the fact that Google basically openly admits to using this information for anything they want.

What I see is that they use it to compile reports on website activity, and for other services related to website activity and internet usage, not to help establish relevancy. Why on Earth would a search engine as concerned about relevancy as Google use something like the presence of Analytics to determine ranking. It doesn't even make sense. Lets make sure that all websites with analytics installed are a few spaces below their rightful position in the SERPS. - Google.

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mayorlan

13 years ago

Can that be? Maybe a mere coincidence.

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John Williamson

13 years ago

I'd definitely say a coincidence.

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gtk29

13 years ago

Has anybody experimented about removing Google Analytics code? For one person it can be coincidence, but for many it can be useful tip

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Cataclysm1987 13 years ago

That's what I'm saying.

Most of the time things are like this in SEO. Since we don't directly control the SERPS, how can any one of us say what is a coincidence and what isn't?

Some people think GA is evil and they will mine data from your site to adjust you in their index.

I'm not sure it is true, I'm just saying that maybe next time my bounce rates are high, GA will not be in my website.
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Darla 13 years ago

Originally Posted by gtk29

Has anybody experimented about removing Google Analytics code? For one person it can be coincidence, but for many it can be useful tip

True. Who REALLY knows what goes on behind closed doors in the Google kitchen? I have GA on one site, its just so easy to see everything laid out, but it never occurred to me that it could possibly have an adverse affect on my site. All of a sudden , logging in to Cpanel every day ( or once a week) to see my stats may not be such a bad idea after all!
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Cataclysm1987

13 years ago

Oh and a quick update, that site is now at number one again. Funny how that works, isn't it?

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Eyetrap 13 years ago

I've been wondering the same thing...I'm going to remove it from two of my sites tonight as a test for a few days.
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- Cataclysm1987 13 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by Eyetrap
  
  I've been wondering the same thing...I'm going to remove it from two of my sites tonight as a test for a few days.
  
  Do it! And post some results. Maybe this isn't just a big conspiracy theory after all?
  
  Thanks
  
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TheChanger

13 years ago

Originally Posted by Cataclysm1987

Either way, I'm staying away from Google analytics from now on. Those snoops at Google can eat it. I want my ranking and I don't need Google poking around my site for data other than my links and my content!!!!

Are you going to use a different analytics software?

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Eyetrap 13 years ago

You can use getclicky.com instead of GA.
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Cataclysm1987 13 years ago

Originally Posted by Gordon Hay

Are you going to use a different analytics software?

Yep. I'm using piwik. It's designed to work just like Google analytics but without Big G spyin on ya
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- themew 13 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by Cataclysm1987
  
  Yep. I'm using piwik. It's designed to work just like Google analytics but without Big G spyin on ya
  
  Piwik looks pretty good and it's open source.
  
  Are you using it on a shared host or a dedicated machine?
  
  Thanks
  
  1 reply
  
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  almondj 13 years ago
  
  I haven't used GA because every time I visit a site with it, seems to slow the site WAY down!
  
  Thanks
  
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yukon

Banned 13 years ago

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FredJones

13 years ago

I would guess it to be a coincidence. Do you think that the moment you removed the GA script, Google search engine came to knnow about it and immediately decided to forget everything that it knew. I would be highly skeptical.

By the way, this is something I keep repeating a number of times and have never seen anyone else jump to this discussion (either this is obvious or I am being technically too deep here): SEOs must understand Google runs its massive algorithms using a distributed computing platform - they use the Hadoop map-reduce paradigm of computation. And I would bet they do it in an asynchronous way (though I have no way to prove it). There is absolutely no way that they could know and understand everything at one instant. And this would also explain the Google dance for new sites plus sites getting stabilized as backlinks diversify to a great extent - whenever they have a stale/old segment of map they can not reduce until the fresh map completes is my personal suspiscion.

So, yours is very very likely to be a coincidence. Why don't you reinstall GA and see whether it drops down, and then again uninstall GA and see whether it jumps back up? If that happens, repeat the same yet once more and then maybe you can conclusively decide?

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Cataclysm1987

13 years ago

I have about as much information to suggest that they forgot about it than for you to suggest that they didn't.

I would try it again but I hate to tamper with a number one ranking. After all, number one does get 40 percent of the traffic. Why even risk losing a good thing?

Keep in mind, I'm not conclusively saying that this is what caused the change. Everyone reading this thread seems to be interpreting that way. I'm only saying that I have enough evidence to be suspicious, and I do not like to take chances in SEO especially when the difference between rankings is exponential in terms of traffic.

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FredJones

13 years ago

Why don't you simply perform the experiments I mentioned? That may clarify a lot.

About the information part, I am very tempted to take a leaf out of classical history - Galileo has as much information to believe the Earth spins as everyone else who believed that the Sun rotated round the Earth - it was just a difference of opinion formed from the same set of observations.

Forget about information - if I were working for Google and was worried about my GA stats to rank my search results then I would not drop the previous stat overnight - my Hadoop crawler would probably not even aggregate this for me of all this in real-enough time. And if I were working for Google but was not worried about my GA stats to rank my search results then the whole point under discussion would not matter anyway.

But as I said, this is purely my intuition and absolutely no information in this, apart from some solid and reasonable guesses. However, you would want to care about your end result and to achieve that simply insert the GA code and remove it, until you either make out it repeats (in which case I shall be happy to eat my words) or it does not (in which case your event will be a pure coincidence).

Originally Posted by Cataclysm1987

I have about as much information to suggest that they forgot about it than for you to suggest that they didn't.

I would try it again but I hate to tamper with a number one ranking. After all, number one does get 40 percent of the traffic. Why even risk losing a good thing?

Keep in mind, I'm not conclusively saying that this is what caused the change. Everyone reading this thread seems to be interpreting that way. I'm only saying that I have enough evidence to be suspicious, and I do not like to take chances in SEO especially when the difference between rankings is exponential in terms of traffic.

Thanks

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dburk

13 years ago

Originally Posted by Cataclysm1987

I have about as much information to suggest that they forgot about it than for you to suggest that they didn't.

I would try it again but I hate to tamper with a number one ranking. After all, number one does get 40 percent of the traffic. Why even risk losing a good thing?

Keep in mind, I'm not conclusively saying that this is what caused the change. Everyone reading this thread seems to be interpreting that way. I'm only saying that I have enough evidence to be suspicious, and I do not like to take chances in SEO especially when the difference between rankings is exponential in terms of traffic.

Hi Cataclysm1987,

You are wise to treat your own suggested correlation with skepticism. A conclusion is generally considered invalid if it cannot be reliably repeated. Since you have not even attempted to repeat the circumstances that led to your suggested theory it should be considered untested and highly speculative.

I do believe that Google looks at user behavior, and your bounce rate as reported by GA, while useful for you, wouldn't be as useful for Google. They already have the ability to track bounces back to the SERP without the aid of GA and it's only that bounce back that would be meaningful to Google.

They don't need your GA data to tell them that a user returned to the SERP after less than 6 seconds of clicking a listing. And if a user found exactly what they were looking for, on the exact page they landed on from a SERP listing, it would be normal to expect a high bounce rate for that page.

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Cataclysm1987

13 years ago

Originally Posted by dburk

They don't need your GA data to tell them that a user returned to the SERP after less than 6 seconds of clicking a listing. And if a user found exactly what they were looking for, on the exact page they landed on from a SERP listing, it would be normal to expect a high bounce rate for that page.

Actually dburk, they don't quite have the ability to track bounce rates just by the SERPS themselves. Let me explain.

Google looks at whether or not a visitor comes back to the SERPS after visiting a site. This gives them a pretty good measurement of how long the visitor was on that site before returning.

However, bounce rate is different than this. Bounce rate is specifically defined as the rate at which users visit your site, then leave without interacting with anything on the site.

Google seeing you come back to the SERPs in a short period of time does give them a measurement of time on site, but it does not give them a measurement on bounce rate!

For all Google knows, my visitors could have checked out 3 or 4 of my pages before leaving. All they know is the visitor came back to the SERPs.

So, this is one thing you can for sure take away from them if you uninstall GA from your site. The bounce rate is something you can only know by installing a tracking cookie to analyze visitor behavior. Bounce rate and time on site are pretty uniquely different.

So yeah they can track my bounce rates back to the SERPs, but for all they know, the user might have liked my site and been on a few different pages in the mean time. I'm just taking one piece of data away from Big G to be on the safe side in this instance.

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dburk

13 years ago

Originally Posted by Cataclysm1987

Actually dburk, they don't quite have the ability to track bounce rates just by the SERPS themselves. Let me explain.

Google looks at whether or not a visitor comes back to the SERPS after visiting a site. This gives them a pretty good measurement of how long the visitor was on that site before returning.

However, bounce rate is different than this. Bounce rate is specifically defined as the rate at which users visit your site, then leave without interacting with anything on the site.

Google seeing you come back to the SERPs in a short period of time does give them a measurement of time on site, but it does not give them a measurement on bounce rate!

For all Google knows, my visitors could have checked out 3 or 4 of my pages before leaving. All they know is the visitor came back to the SERPs.

So, this is one thing you can for sure take away from them if you uninstall GA from your site. The bounce rate is something you can only know by installing a tracking cookie to analyze visitor behavior. Bounce rate and time on site are pretty uniquely different.

So yeah they can track my bounce rates back to the SERPs, but for all they know, the user might have liked my site and been on a few different pages in the mean time. I'm just taking one piece of data away from Big G to be on the safe side in this instance.

Hi Cataclysm1987,

That is exactly my point, a bounce rate without understanding the design and purpose of a page or a website and TOS (Time on Site) along with other things, isn't meaningful to Google. However if you return to the SERP within 2 seconds, that would be a strong indicator that you did not find what you were searching for. Google already has the data they need without peeking at your GA data.

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whateverpedia

13 years ago

One of the things Google uses to determine page rank/position is the speed which a page loads.

On EVERY page I visit that takes a long time to load, the reason for the delay is always, I repeat ALWAYS, "waiting for google analytics".

So,...

...GA slows down the page load speed;
Google "punishes" sites for slow loading speed;
having GA installed can "punish" your site;

So, removing GA can improve your load speed, and therefore, your rankings.

Makes sense to me.

It has also worked for me.

Don't believe me. Try it for yourself.

Set up a page with GA insralled. Set up the same page on the same server without GA. Time how long each page takes to load. Draw your own conclusions.