Google Analytics - In-Page Analytics

[THB]

I had a strange thought waking up this morning, and was curious to hear other people's opinions on it.

In Google Analytics, under Content > In-Page Analytics, Google shows what links on your site pages get clicked and how many times plus other metrics.  Do you think they use that data for ranking back links so-to-speak?

What I mean is, say I had a back link to my site on example.com, and example.com had google analytics installed.  Google can see through google analytics whether my link has been clicked on.  Say that my link gets no clicks, do you think that Google would use that metric against my site deeming it "not popular" or "not a good resource", even if example.com was a very popular site?

And it could work the other way.  Say my link got thousands of clicks on example.com, do you think that Google might use that to promote my site?

I couldn't find any other discussion on this anywhere, so am not sure if people have already thought about this.

[THB]

Thanks Jason.  I still wonder, though.  Google has said one thing and done the other in the past.

This thought jumped into my head because I have managed to land some very lucrative backlinks to my site from several (~25 or so) major players in my niche.  DA's of 90-100, and bang on for what I deal in.  However, my backlink gets zero clicks to my site which got me thinking that perhaps Google does use the GA data to determine the more popular links on a page.  And upon checking, the majority of the sites which my link sits on has Google Analytics installed.

To put it into perspective, the relation between my site to the sites in which I have backlinks on would be like a company who owns a search engine getting a backlink on google.com, or an independent news outlet getting a backlink on CNN.com.

It's been about 6-8 months now since I landed ~80% of these backlinks, but have yet to notice any significant changes in the SERP's for my site.  I'm giving Google the benefit of the doubt that new backlinks can take some time to set in, in fear that they're temporary backlinks so as to not reward a site prematurely in case that backlink comes down.

Thanks for the reply!

[JFritton]

Hi THB,

According to the recent Q&A with Matt Cutts at SMX 2012, Google does not look at Analytics for ranking.

http://www.seroundtable.com/smxadv-mattcutts-15253.html

However, if you're getting a good amount of traffic through a link, I'm sure it may help ranking in a tangential way.  If it's getting traffic then the referring page probably has a decent authority so that link is probably worth more for rankings than one from a page that isn't getting much traffic.