I dropped out of GA, when they changed the TOS at Google, I also created a website to bash their brains out, still working on that one, I left one website in GA, and its rank dropped like a rock, the others websites not in GA, all Went up in ranking, but I will say that all my sites have unique well written content, no more than 25 percent advertising.

Natural Back links, I have better organic traffic with as little as 12 backlinks as some that have hundreds of backlinks.

So its not all GA, but I do think that not only is GA not accurate but they use the data to their benefit not yours, use your server logs they dont lie.

HigherPrThanGod, you didn't really mention if you had other control sites without analytic that didn't drop, with th Panda drama and backlink networks dying there are other explanations for sudden drops.

I believe one course (a WSO?) about recovering from Panda setbacks mentioned eliminating Analytics and webmaster tools as one of his general precautions.

(Actually his case studies seemed to rebuild the whole site on a new domain)

This actually makes a lot of sense. Perhaps I'll move everything back over to Statcounter.

At this point google analytics is all risk and no reward, I honestly see no reason to keep it.

Switched back to Statcounter. Would there be any disadvantages to ditching Webmaster Tools as well? Any advantages to keeping it?

I have not used any other analytics than GA. I hear ou guys mentioning Statcounter..........easy to setup and free. When i say easy i guess i am also talking about time taken to switch 17 sites over.

I have heard good things about Piwik as well. Anyone know what their setup process is like?

Trashing your GA account was a good idea they don't need to no all your business I have moved else where as well

Will give it a blast. Cheers

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Just looking at stat counter now.

Free Accounts

*Lifetime summary stats, independent from log
*Free log quota of 500 per project
*Full range of stats pages
*No credit card required
*Stats pages supported by ads

What does a log quota of 500 per project actually cover? Per project means per site right?

Statcounter is something I've used for a while now, just on sites that I'd needed more immediate traffic data from. Google Failalytics was really more for long-term traffic stats.

Just to clarify - I'm not saying I can prove Google is responsible for anything. I'm merely saying I don't trust them at this point with my stats. All the time they spend talking about how important time on site is, and low and behold I give them that data in Analytics. They say they don't use the data, but what else would they say? It's the ultimate honey pot. They got a lot of us marketers using it and from that they can figure out what we're doing.

More importantly is - I don't really need Google Analytics. If there's a new domain I'm tracking and trying to improve, I can always use StatCounter and Awstats in cPanel admin. Months ago I did receive a warning from an seo guy to remove analytics from my sites. I discounted it then, but going from 150-200 unique's from Google A DAY on one domain down to 25 overnight, and then watching the rest of them follow suit told me everything I need to know.

I used to admire and like Google but unfortunately they're slipping. I think it's just a matter of time before someone challenges them, at least in search. Hopefully.. And if someone out there wants to know how to beat Google, I actually think it's simple. The "search spider or indexer". Google simply seems to index quicker and better than Bing. It's almost always a given that any new domain I setup will be indexed in Google, before Bing/Yahoo. That must change, before Bing can compete with Google. Microsoft needs an army of bots out there, much more active and I believe they could compete.

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This is an interesting discussion.

ALL of my sites seem to have been affected in some way or another, and whilst my traffic has pretty much remained the same, my time onsite has plummeted. I can only put this down to non relevant search queries.

Im not how they may have, or even if they did establish a relationship between my sites - but one things for sure, it wouldnt have been too hard given the use of GA and GWT.

HighPR - Did ALL of your 100 sites get hit?

I've always believed GA is evil.This thread confirmed my fears. I'd never set up GA on all of my sites.

I might try this. Not sure if it's anything relevant to me but my main site has gone down from 700 unique a day down to 100, 200 max - using GA. I also think GA is so much less useful than it used to be. StatCounter you say? On my way...

Dam conspiracies. For me this all happened very suddenly about 3 days ago... I have never used ONE fake link and almost all my traffic is no longer coming in.

I deleted all my accounts from Google Analytics.

Fortunately I don't install Webmaster tool out of strange incident. But I installed a Google Analytic. I think I want to delete the Analytic too after the Penguin.

So would you please tell me, if I delete the Analytic script....will it affect the rank??

I deleted all my sites from G Webmaster last year and have never used Analytics. Never trusted them. Some people say it's a myth, but myth or not, I see no reason to volunteer any inside info about my sites other than a sitemap to tell them where my content is.

Statcounter is great for quick stats and AW Stats works great for more in depth stats. Analytics isn't necessary. In addition, I forget the name of it, but there is an non-Google open source analytics script out there somewhere that some people swear by.

I have have a lot of sites that were built before GA was around that too have suffered during this update. They did not have google analytics on them, but they too were penalized.

One thing I know though is that it is very difficult to maintain 100 or more quality websites. So the fact that you have more than 100 domains makes me wonder what the level of quality was on those sites.

You could be wasting your time on blaming GA when in fact it is just that your 100+ domains are just of a poor quality and not desired by Google.

Link trades by the way have been against Google webmaster guidelines for over a decade now.

Dammit. I'm still on the fence on this one. I want to flip my websites on Flippa and Google Analytics adds some serious credibility. What do you think I should do?

Are you planning to add your sites again to GA in future? If we have some great content, do we need to panic again? Google slapping this time with GA is something most of the marketers have not expected.

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I had a similar experience. Although I was split testing at the time.

I had 8 sites with GA and 8 with Statcounter. The 8 with GA have all more or less taken a nose dive, and those with Statcounter are still round about at the same level.

I know 16 sites is not a lot in a test, but there was still a significant difference in the results.

I feel your pain! I have one site that I have built for two years and I just got it a few months ago to where I was making $1k a month.

I was ranking on page one for 5 of about 8 main keywords, for months.

As of April 25th those keywords I got my site ranked on page one for, are now on pages 5 through 30. In fact my home page which was at #4 on page one of Google is now on page #30!

This is a very content-heavy site and everyone who has looked at it agrees it deserves high ranking, Even Google did for many months. But not anymore.

So I spent a couple hours today writing a blog, sticking it to Google. Does no good but made me feel a lot better! I would have spent the time SEO'ing my site or adding content or something to make my sites come back up the ranks... but I have no clue what google wants us to do at this point.

All I know is Google is taking $ out of my pockets, for no good reason (my site met the standard they kept pushing: "Content is king!").

And so I have also removed google analytics and unsubscribed to webmaster tools and I plan to stop using google as a search engine as much as possible and stop using Chrome, Adwords, etc.

I encourage others to do the same. Google is evil.

Yes, I agree, Google is evil and dishonest. I will Never ever use Google Analytics and Webmaster tools anymore!
However, Google is the biggest and I need traffic from Google :confused:

I didn't think using Google Analytics had any bearing on how they ranked your site and thought it was one of those myths, but I realised that the 3 of my sites which weren't negetively effected by the Penguin update aren't on Analytics, but the sites that are on Analytics have moved way way down the SERPs to the point of not being able to see them. Really odd.

None of my sites are listed in Google Analytics anymore, but that didn't prevent them from taking 800 of them out of their index last week.

Don't really know what they're doing, but it's been brutal.

Charlie

Wow, Piwik looks so cool , gonna install it now...

What about Feedburner, should i drop using that too ?

If you've been lurking around the SEO forum you'd see there was a major Google algo change last week. My main site also suffered big time. According to GA, down to 25 visits a day after averaging 200 per day for the last year. Don't know what's going on or what to do now. I never did anything Black Hat to increase rankings and it's got lots of great content. I can't imagine being signed up to Google Analytics would have anything to do with it.

I have sites on Analytics that were not hit from this update, this last month actually has been great for my rankings, I build them slow and steady with various methods for diversity and link variations. I honestly think Google would trust sites more that use their tools we have nothing to hide but I could be wrong.

Im purchasing a website in the next month that gets over 15,000 visitors a month with an average time of 2 and a half minutes on site. I build sites to flip overtime I really don't want those stats to disappear if I were to leave Google Tools because in my experience past stats equal more money.

I'm not defending GA or GWT .. because really I can't trust Google as far as I could throw them.

They've been getting fined lately for stuff that's pretty damn uncool and I think of them more as hypocritic in general ...

The problem here is penguin ... my sites been hit hard .. but now I seem to be ranking for stupid search terms that aren't even anything related to the articles that I write on my site.

Google need to sort out their act, but then again we don't have a good alternative for Search .. Bing and Yahoo are even worse in terms of relevance for me personally.

If there was a decent alternative for search so that we wouldn't have to rely on them I'd use it in a heart beat.

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I wonder if your traffic will go up after deleting em

I've recently changed all my sites from "Google Analytics" to "Get clicky" and actually experienced a rank increase with out doing any other extra SEO.

Not sure if it was just a simple coincidence but over 50 websites all doing better then when i had "Google Analytics" installed.

Use Piwik instead of GA. Not only will your sites load faster, but for some marketers it is insane to give Google a list of your sites and your stats.

If you use Adsense then Google already has a list of your sites and some stats. Anything else is just a gift to G to that can later be used against you.

.

Like many others in this thread, I've been on the edge of whether to delete GA or not for a while now. None of my websites make me much money currently so it never really affected me all that much.

But I think this thread has sent me over the edge.

Google is becoming too untrustworthy to continue using their services. It's time to move on.

Hello Stats Counter

- Trevor

I have never understood why anybody would install Google Analytics. Made no sense to me whatsoever. There are very good alternatives available that are not connected to big bad G.

I just installed Piwik on my server two days ago. My sites load so much faster. Now they are totally loaded in 1.3-1.4 seconds. Which is down from 2.5-3.0 with analytics.

I did have an interesting encounter with webmaster tools the other day. I checked my one site and it was on page 18+ so I deleted my WMT. I checked 2-3 hours later and the same site was on page 7. It stayed like that for a day or so and went back to page 16 and is increasing. It got me curious if it was the removal because nothing else changed. Who knows.

It's way bigger than Google analytics and webmaster tools.

Google has wanted to move towards rewarding larger brand companies for years. Little guys like us don't feed them enough to buy the salad dressing for the Google campus cafeteria.

So I suppose all of you nuts are taking off Adsense off your pages as well? Not gonna be using gonna Chrome or Android either? You're gonna hope and pray visitors don't click the back button to the SERPs after they land on your crappy page unsatisifed ? --- which by the way is WHAT THEY ACTUALLY MEASURE AND MAY USE AGAINST YOU.

If you actually think deleting WMT is gonna somehow hide data from Google, i don't know what to say. All it does is keep you in the dark.

Instead of the deleting WMT & removing GA, why don't you fix the actual issues with your site.

ive been using getclicky on my sites which i love, but still have GA code on them too...well did, i just deleted my GA profiles...the stats there in my personal experience seemed to be very flawed at best...lets see what happens

It is redicouls to think Google will punish only the sites using their Analytics, if anything you would think they want to reward people for using their services which isn't the case ether.... SEO is changing, links are decreasing in value, user stats, time on site bounce rates and social proof are where it's heading. Id love it if links were not the main factor anymore I honestly just want to focus on my site more instead of worrying about link building bs

Another possible alternative to GA:
Web Log Storming PC Software with a 75% off Discount Coupon Code - View Traffic Stats in Extreme Detail
(Download your log files, and install this to analyse them.)

I'm not really sure what difference GA and WMT is really going to make. All google is doing is reporting back to you what they already see for your benefit. The only thing that could possibly aid them is you adding site maps but all that does is makes it easier for them to find all your pages............which technically you would want the to do anyway if you want that page to rank.

They do not need you to have a GA or WMT account to be able to see your site and come to their own conclusions.

The one downside i personally see with GA is the occasional decrease in page load speed but thats about the only real impact i can see them having on your sites.

Don't get me wrong i'm not really a fan of google and personally would prefer to use independent products when and where i can. But this thread is starting to look a little bit hysterical now

The objection I have is that Google Analytics, is just not accurate, which logically tells me one thing that is undeniable, if it is not accurately tracking visitors just what is it doing.

I used GA, as a tool to test out the difference between my own server based statistics and what I was seeing from Google Analytics, It soon become obvious that GA was up to something different, I have no proof, but I suspect that when you read the TOS you will see what they are doing.

Its all for sale, and guess what, most people are giving to google free, when you open up a GA account read the TOS, and look at what your doing, literally you might be providing data to a large corporation about how they can offer products and services to your customers, (leaving you out in the cold, or at best paying you a few cents in comparison)

But what happens when a conflict arises...

What happens when you have a website that is doing better than one of those corporate websites, is it beyond your imagination that Google would Not use that data against your website, (really look at the TOS, and tell me they disclaim that)

I.E. Google is not your personal Yoda instructor...

As they say, its nothing personal its just business the sooner you realize that Google is not in business for your benefit, the better off you will be.

Google collects millions of dollars from advertisers.

Unless your one of those advertisers google does not even know you exist, unless your a member of GA that is.

Comical thread. Next I suggest everyone here stops taking the 'free traffic' from Google too

I removed my analytics account after finding out that all my sites that were in webmaster tools and analytics were dropped like a bad habit on the 25th april. The only few that didn't drop were those using "getclicky" Never will I put my trust in google, never....

I removed Google Analytics months ago only b/c didn't feel comfortable Google having all the information about website.

OP,

You're (at least) one year late. Many IM'ers ditched GA/WMT etc long time ago. Reason? The same as yours... and private testings.

Anyway, this is NOT an easy topic, and I understand WHY some people (still) defend these scripts - and how they are useful in *some* cases, like people flippin sites, or for Adwords tracking.

But, as you'll see along the next months, you REALLY don't need them, and most probably you'll see an impact of NOT using them.

If you can, please get back to this thread in 2-4 months from now and update us with results.

P.S.: Before some of you start shouting at me "how will he know, it could be something else" etc etc etc, feel free to go on using these scripts. Or try to do some test on your own - especially with WMT and see what gives.

You're in for a surprise, I promise you.

Hogwash. I manage SEO for 50 different clients and big businesses and every one of them has analytics, webmaster tools, and conversion tracking installed. Only two of them lost any rankings whatsoever.

Google already knows what type of links your building and how good your content is without access. But, Google does like to see good time on site, low bounce rates, fast sites, and so on. This is proven with SEOmoz case studies.

So if you have solid design, usability, and you give your visitors what they want you have nothing to lose. I'd even go as far as to say that a site that has good analytics metrics is probably forgiven for other overly spammy practices used because they know your visitors are engaged and happy when they get to your site.

Are you guys really comparing google analytics to statcounter

Another thing, with keyword "not provided" now up to about 40% for some of my sites, how are you people not using WMT gonna know what the hell people searched for to get your site?

The only way to get that data now is through WMT.

We saw this coming for a long time. What are some other solutions out there? Onr of our partners loves this one: Mint: A Fresh Look at your Site (<--not an affiliate link)

I haven't seen a big change yet, but I did remove all of the analytics and webmaster tools.

I too am using stat counter. It is simple and gets the job done.

I'm not trying to give G more information than I need to.

-Omar

This is the very reason that I now no longer have google analytics or webmaster tools anywhere near my sites!

You are giving them way too much information!

I now have piwik (it's FREE)installed to analyze my data which works just as well as analytics ever did.

Here's the link Piwik - Web analytics - Open source

Good luck

I have always wondered....they say bounce rate is a big deal to Google. Without GA installed, how do they figure your bounce rate? I know one thing is if someone clicks your link in the SERPS and then hits the back page they look at how long they were on your page, but apart from that, how do they know how long people stay on your site?

From April 27th 4 of my website have lost more 80% of their traffic. None of the things present or done in the website violate any guidelines of Google

I've also deleted today (after reading this thread) one of mine analytics account for a website with most traffic of my 4 websites. I switched over to piwik. My visitors are cut to only 35-40 % from 27th April. I used to have 1000 UV daily, and now I have only 350-400.
I'll see if this analytics deletion would get me back my visitors

Absurd to delete analytics or webmaster tools, based on nothing else than a bizarre assumption that it would help anything.

Analytics or WMT is not the reason your sites dropped, and where is even a remote evidence that deleting the accs would bring rankings back?

You seriously believe a multibillion dollar company like Google who has 1000s of bots running which spider the web etc...needs some script installed on your site to get their data for helping them assess your site? Do you know anything at all how search engines even work?

Just shaking my head here...

I guess nobody here uses Chrome, Android, PageRank, Gmail, or YouTube. Google is EVERY WHERE.

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If you know what's good for you and you are doing any kind of SEO or link building I would stop using Google Analytics with immediate effect!

It is my belief that Google is using the SEO data that this tool collects AGAINST WEBMASTERS!!!

I have a few new sites some are using ga and some are using Piwik. My hosts are excellent they provide one click installs for various stat counters Piwik is one as well as one click installs for wordpress, joomla, phpbb, 10 search engine submission etc

I'll see how they fare with similar levels of backlinking and strenght of keyword comp

I took this stance over a year ago and see my sites were in better shape in a matter of weeks..

Now use Piwik, does all I need and more.

Guys removing Google Analytics doesn't help at all if you are also using Adsense (most do). Adsense by itself provides all data Google needs.

So you also delete Adsense ?