Does Traffic Comming To Your Site Make Google Think Better of your site

[Morristown]

Here is a question I am wondering about since I started playing with my site, and noticed that I was getting 30 hits a day from a location that I posted to which has a no follow tage on the link back at me. So just that one place I am getting like 1000 hits a month to my website. Over all it looks like the site is getting hit like 4000 times a month or more.

I am going to load google analylitics to see what it has to say.

Please give your opinion on what the relationship is to traffic that is already comming to your site and what the SE's think of that, or do they not see traffic that did not go through say google?

Jim

[ericbramlett]

Everything that I've read indicates that SE's do not use traffic to determine a site's value. I believe you would have to install some sort of script for any SE to even gauge your site's traffic (like analytics.) However, if you're getting 30 visitors/day from a source, then you need to continue doing what you're doing, and consider learning to squeeze even more traffic from that source.

One point/question - are you getting 30 hits or 30 visitors per day from this source?

[Homesurfer]

First, you gotta quit using the term "hits". It is an antiquated term and doesn't mean jack shinola in the modern world of the web. In the early days of the web people didn't have images and junk all over their web site and a "hit" was almost equal to a page view, and many sites were just one long page, so it USED to be a meaningful term in the ancient days of the web, but it is useless now. All a hit means is that a file was opened and your home page probably has LOTS of files because every image is a separate file, and that's just for starters.

Second, Google doesn't use traffic as any part of the algorithm to determine your search engine results. At least for now. Some people thought that perhaps the Google Bar or cookies or "personalized search" could help rank a site like Alexa does and sites that actually get visited would start ranking higher, but imagine all the robots and scamming that would go on if that were true. It's too easy to manipulate so Google doesn't do it. That's straight from the mouth of Google.

[JennSellsFast]

I'm sure he meant "unique visitors". Hits is still a popular term for that even though it means a totally different thing. It's commonly thrown around this board, but I take it as "uniques".

[Lydia]

There have been a number of experiments performed recently (and reported on-line) indicating that Google DOES use Analytics data in their search engine rankings. If you use Analytics, and have a lot of pageviews for a given keyword, expect your rankings to go up for that keyword.

It cuts both ways. If you have a lot of hits for a keyword that result in bounces, you will start to drop for that keyword.

[JennSellsFast]

What happends if you do not use Google analytics at all? Does that hurt your rankings?

[ericbramlett]

There have been a number of experiments performed recently (and reported on-line) indicating that Google DOES use Analytics data in their search engine rankings.

Would you care to share a link to these experiments?

[36towns]

There have been a number of experiments performed recently (and reported on-line) indicating that Google DOES use Analytics data in their search engine rankings. If you use Analytics, and have a lot of pageviews for a given keyword, expect your rankings to go up for that keyword.

It cuts both ways. If you have a lot of hits for a keyword that result in bounces, you will start to drop for that keyword.

I am interested in a link too.

[MikeDammann]

There have been a number of experiments performed recently (and reported on-line) indicating that Google DOES use Analytics data in their search engine rankings. If you use Analytics, and have a lot of pageviews for a given keyword, expect your rankings to go up for that keyword.

It cuts both ways. If you have a lot of hits for a keyword that result in bounces, you will start to drop for that keyword.

I do believe that to be true. Google also will take into consideration when people search for your site directly and type in the name of your site, like doing a search for the term "propertyhogs.com" or "realestatewebmasters.com".
MIke

[Lydia]

SeoMoz blog post

Google Analytics Experiment