This is a question that James has seen come up in the past.
His suspicion has always been that it is more of a trust/EAT signal for Google, rather than an actual ranking factor.
He decided to test this to see what the real deal is and if having Google Analytics on your site can indeed boost rank.
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It's not an indication of how strong that ranking factor is, as with all these single variable testing to be stacked up against each other, but it's still interesting information nonetheless.
And there are still a lot of people that just don't like giving their analytics data to Google.
They don't trust it, they don't appreciate the system over there and stuff. And for one, I don't trust it enough to be my only one and I use get clicky on pretty much all of my sites as well.
I have them both on the same time.
But who knew, you might actually get some ranking benefit out of it, let's go through here.
And you can see the different dates and time periods that you waited, and just appeared, there's this number 1, middle number 1, and then that's the last one, it stayed there, it went to number 1, and it stayed there until 24th of March from the 5th of March.
That's a long period of time and that means all the balancing..
Dori: That is really incredible.
I think we've tested this before. And it didn't have any effect at all.
This was like a long time ago and this is really interesting.
I'd like to see this hold up like next month, do a revisit to this, to see if it's still holding. T
hat's crazy, that's batshit crazy that Google would do that.
Clint: Yeah, I can't see that it would be a keyword density thing, because they don't mention in the in that code that they gave you.
There is no mention of any type of keywords. There's no mention of domain name. So you wouldn't be messing with that. And even if it was, it's not as test keyword.
It's odd that if you I doubt this is like significant, like you're not going to go from 5 to 4 because you had a Google Analytics.
But it's odd that it wouldn't even be a thing at all.
Why would the bot even considered a thing?
Dori: Could it be possible that the HTML code, so they're counting words in HTML? And so just adds a little bit more HTML code? .
Clint: Can be words or lines and could also be each signal as far as one of the little mini algorithms that all kind of encompass what we would think of as eat.
In this case, it's a verification that the site is real. Insofar as it's got analytics on it, and here's all its data.
Dori: Well, if it was just analytics, that would make me feel a little bit better than Google Analytics.
I think would be is just downright evil.
Clint: Yeah, that's a good idea and maybe I'll I'll test one with just clicking on it and see what happens.
Dori: Yeah and test it against Google Analytics too
Clint: Yeah, that's good idea and we'll look at that because I think the clicky one does actually have more code and then the Google ones.
Dori: That would be really interesting.
Clint: But if it is a ranking factor James, you can send us to your local Senator or Congressman is doing any trust investigations.
Dori: That's right. That's like an antitrust thing, that's huge.