Archive · Original writing. Restored from a saved copy of this website. References, services, and opinions reflect the time it was written. View the archived source.
I have reason to believe Google just started using your traffic stats against you! I’ve come across two cases this month where the exact low performing keywords were abruptly removed from Google’s search results resulting in a 20%+ loss in organic traffic. If this happened once, I could see this being just pure coincidence but lightning doesn’t strike in the same place twice and its happened on two different sites in different niches.
Further evidence that the penalty only removed high bounce rate keyword is that the day after the penalty took place, the overall bounce rate decreased significantly. This is exactly what you would expect to see if Google used Analytics data against you.
Even more reason to stop using GA is on September 23rd 2013, Google removed keyword data entirely as reported by SearchEngineWatch.com making it almost useless.
This is a tough decision for me as I have been using the platform since it first came out and I am Google Analytics Certified.
Proof Positive
Starting today I am conducting experiments to see if removing the Analytics code from one of my sites will have any affect on the rankings of my lower performing keywords. I’ll be replacing GA with Piwik a more private, server based system. Check back for the full details and reports.
I hope I’m wrong but if my findings are conclusive, I’ll never use GA again and mark this as the night they drove old Google down.