Does Analytics affect Page Rank or Quality Score?

People have speculated for a while about Google analytics affecting your pagerank and hences your search engine positions and website traffic (example here).  I always thought of them as being one of the many conspiracy theories which come along with being as successful as Google has become.  But whilst sat at this weeks Google – Above and Beyond conference in Dublin one of the speakers made a statement which made me doubt my prior judgement.  The discussion was not about page rank (PR) but about quality score (QS) and how Google uses the information available to it to make a judgement on quality and also utilises a rule of averages on user judgement to allow the best sites to profit in the long run.

What caught my attention were the comments about using the information they had available to judge quality.  The speaker was obviously talking in this instance about impressions, clicks, creative copy, keywords, landing page content etc, but it just made me think that analytics fell under that same category.  It is information that Google has to hand to judge your website and it allows them to throw in elements like bounce rate and conversion rate into the mix for elements affecting PR and QS.

The response I got from Google representatives when I approached it with them is that it would be unfair to use analytics as not everyone uses it.  Elements such as meta data, inbound links, website content, ad content and keywords are free and open for everyone to use as they wish so it is fair game.  But not everyone has Google Analytics so to make a judgement on an individual website based on its use, either positive or negative, would be unfair.  That is a  valid point, but doesn’t actually satisfy my question really, I don’t necessarily think that Google would shy away from its use completely for this reason alone.  After all it contains valuable information about a websites usability.

Hopefully I will be able to prove once and for all soon enough, I plan on trialling a new anlytics package very soon on The Digital Lookout and am looking for a case study from a quality score perspective, watch this space!