SEO trend confirmed

A while ago, when trying to figure out the SEO trends for 2008, I was saying that in their search for more relevant results, the search engines will try and use data such as pages/visits, bounce rates or time spent on a page/website. The data is hard to collect unless you’re using some sort of tracking system that can track and send the data to the search engines. Google Analytics (GA) is a free web traffic analysis tool offered by Google to webmasters.

The latest GA feature is called Benchmarking (still in beta at the moment when the article was written) and it uses anonymously the data gathered on GA’s servers to create some sort of industry benchmarking metrics to which you can compare your own data and see how well or how poor you’re doing. But in order to be able to do this, you have to be part of the data collection and enable data sharing in the Analytics Settings menu (see below).

This subject – Google using GA data – was discussed on WPW forums and it started quite a controversy. Some of the members were afraid that Google might use this to level the “playing field” for all websites by recording all the high conversion rates phrases via GA and supply them back to general public via their Keyword Conversion Tool. This will definitely reduce the advantage provided by SEO for a website, if all the hard earned, high conversion, well researched keyword phrases are made available for free to the other websites.

What’s your opinion on this? Is Google Analytics a “spyware” program?