: Does Google rate the webpage by amount of visits? There is quite extensive discussion about this topic on another website and I am really losing my confidence. The thing is that I claim that

@Heady270

I find it plausible that Google uses the number of visitors to a website as a ranking factor.


Google can get this data (See Can Googlebot read any hosting stats?)

Google Analytics: Although Google has said they won't use Google Analytics data for ranking purposes.
Google AdSense, Google TagManager, or DFP: These are all 3rd party JavaScript on many web pages that could send data to Google the same way that Analytics does.
Google toolbar: The Google toolbar sends data to Google about every page that the user with it installed visits.
Firefox and Chrome Safe Browsing: Google runs a service that checks the reputation of websites that you visit. It is enabled in both Firefox and Chrome by default and it sends information about each site visited to Google.
Other PageRank indicators: Other browser plugins that show the pagerank of a page also send the URL to Google for every page visited.
From ISPs: ISPs often sell data about which pages their users visit. I don't know that Google buys this data, but it could. In the case of Google Fiber, Google is the ISP.
From DNS servers - Google runs its own popular DNS servers. Users send queries to these Google servers to get the IP addresses of the sites they are going to use.

Amount of traffic would be correlated with site quality. Google would be especially interested in the number of visitors that are using the site because they want to. Google would certainly want to filter the data. They would do so in a manner similar to how they have to be very careful about which inbound links to count.

Filter out bot traffic
Filter out or discount advertising traffic
Filter out fraudulent traffic
Filter out traffic that Google itself sends the site (to avoid a feedback loop)



Even if Google does use traffic as a ranking signal, it would probably be a minor one.


Most of the time amount of traffic would line up with other indicators such as Pagerank
Google has never announced that they use any traffic signals as a ranking factor


The reason for Google to include traffic as a ranking signal would be to catch sites that suddenly get lots of users and a good reputation without using SEO as their primary traffic source. Sites that go viral or rely on social media for example.

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@Pierce454

As @John stated your logic is correct. I'll add that even with Google Analytics, Google wouldn't try to correlate and analyze the traffic data from it to affect your ranking because GA is just another web service. I just don't see them using it to analyze your sites.

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@Pope3001725

No. They do not. And your logic is spot on.


They don't know how much traffic any sites gets unless it is using Google Analytics which is only a tiny portion of all websites.
Traffic is not an indicator of content quality or relevance.
It can be easily manipulated. You can have your own bots reload your pages constantly or run an ad campaign that boosts your traffic. Or just trick people in coming to your site. A visit is a visit.
It's a self fulfilling prophecy. Sites that rank #1 in Google will get more traffic then the sites below it. As a result it will get more traffic which will help keep it ranked above the other sites.
It doesn't take into account how long someone was on a page. If someone visited the page and then immediately left because they didn't like it or it wasn't what they were looking for it still would be a visit.


Update


As mentioned in the comments here is a link to a video where Matt Cutts covers this very topic.

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