Google's New Privacy Policy and Analytics

[Jolora]

Does anybody know if Google's new privacy policy allows it to use data gathered by Analytics to be used as a ranking factor in the SERPs?

[mikecp]

http://www.google.com/intl/en/analytics/privacyoverview.html

http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1011397

According to the GA privacy statement (first link) and, more specifically, their data sharing policy (2nd link), Google would be in direct violation of their own policies if they used your data to improve their search product, provided you have the "Do Not Share my Google Analytics Data" option set.

Do not share my Google Analytics data: This option excludes data from being included in any automated processes that aren’t specifically related to operating and improving Google Analytics or protecting the security and integrity of the data.

Google employees have said before that their is absolutely no link between this data and their search algorithm, though "saying" that isn't as iron clad as the above sharing setting.

Of course, Google's recently found a few ways to violate privacy, so anything can happen. Their publicly available privacy policy is the best we can do!

[Jolora]

I'm not so convinced that they wouldn't at least like to. There are lots of different factors that I am sure they use already where sometimes the effect may be neutral on some non applicable sites and used for others where possible.

For now I'm probably just paranoid but I would never rule it out. I was really just wondering if the new privacy policy at least allows Google to do this theoretically.

[BryanCasson]

That would not make any sense as there are millions of sites out there that do not use Google Analytics.  Having a Google Analytics account does not have any impact whatsoever on ranking. My take on the privacy policy is that they will use the data to better their algorithm as a whole but should not affect individual accounts at all.