Visited stats affecting rankings?

[BobAnderson]

If visitor stats affect rankings should we be worried as we are making our website probably the most user friendly useful site in our field but this includes cutting down the time it takes for a user to order and our pages are also one page so all the information is there and easy to use the problem is this results in 1 page visits and probably one of the lowest visit times of our industry.

Say for example a user sees all of the information and and gets a quote  another website has 5 pages the users spends more time and visits more pages to find how to order but they eventually leave after they have give up would this site win via Google user stats?

[RobertFisher]

Bob,

You have posed a question that is a Pandora's box of conflicting opinions. So, off the the opinions, etc.

First, for my money, the best read for analytics knowledge is Avinash Kaushik whose blog is Occams Razor. About a year ago he had a very thought provoking post on choosing what KPI's you use wisely.  And this is a bit of your dilemma.

You start with "If visitor stats affect ranking..." and then the question assumes certain facts not in evidence: Pageviews are a factor in ranking, time on site is a factor in ranking, bounce rate is a factor in ranking, etc.IMO , if they are, they are small factors. Assume your problem looks this way: We have a site that now provides the quickest and easiest way for our industry to get a needed group of products. The ease of use and the rapidity with which a product can be found are staggering and we are seeing more and more conversions as the result. Is Google's algorithm going to cause us to lose SERP ranking as the result? I think the answer is NOPE.

Are you seeing more and more visits? Uniques? etc.? If things are as you say they are my guess would be yes you are. Congratulations.

In our shop we have a few clients. I do not know a one who would complain about more visits and more sales, even if they dropped in ranking. But, the good news is, you won't if all you say here is true. But,

If your info supplied here is anecdotal and based on a common belief that "Our site is better than the other guys because we built it.", then, well things may work out differently.

I urge you to read the post by Avinash as it is really enlightening. Simply put, a great question from it is this: if a site has a lot of visits and lower time on site and page views is that because people did not find what they wanted? or, Is it because they found what they wanted and took care of business? IMO, Google gets there are two correct answers.

Hope this helps,

Best

[ThompsonPaul]

Not sure what it's going to take to kill this theory that visitor stats are used as a ranking factor, but here's some food for thought.

Google has shown repeatedly that their primary focus for ranking factors is things which can be consistently applied to all sites, and are hard to fake or game. (And they work very hard to punish sites they do catch faking or gaming ranking signals.)

The only way they could gather these visitor traffic signals is by jacking into your Google Analytics or Adwords/Adsense accounts

• Google Analytics is used on a little over 60% of websites. So Google would be ignoring over 40% of websites (including many of the really big players who use enterprise analytics like WebTrends, SiteCatalyst etc)
• using data from Adwords/Adsense would be even more unreliable as an even smaller percentage of sites use these.
• incorrect implementation of tracking codes causes completely inaccurate Analytics data. I see this on new client sites all the time
• in 30 seconds I can adjust your website to have Analytics report any Bounce Rate you want.
• another trivial tweak to your site's code and I can have Analytics report double or triple your pageviews.

Bottom line, trying to track visitor stats is far too unreliable and easily manipulated, not to mention outside their own terms of service.

On top of that, Matt Cutts is on record as categorically stating that Google does not use visitor stats as ranking signals. (I was in the room at SMX Advanced last year when he said it.

** The one exception to this is Google's use of bounce rate from the actual SERP pages. It's widely considered that having a user click on your site from a SERP, then quickly bounce back to the SERP for another search is an indication of negative quality of your site.

In addition to all of the above, as you yourself state, Bob, there are many sites where a short time on site and few pages viewed can be indication of a site that does its job very well. IMO Google's not dumb enough to measure all sites with the same yardstick like that.

Hope that makes sense.

Paul