Does the time a user spend on your site affect your Google ranking? [duplicate]

Question

I have searched this but haven't found any answers at all really.

I want to know if the time a user spends on your site increase your ranking in Google.

My company wants to build it's own webinar software that will aim to increase traffic (as well as other marketing benefits).

At the moment the process is as follows:

User receives a link 1hr before the webinar starts The link takes them to our site, giving us 1 hit, and then gets them to download some desktop webinar software (GoToMeeting in our case). This means that the user is no longer on our site for the remainder of the webinar. If we were to iframe (or directly) make the webinar on our domain such that the user never leaves to use the desktop software, will this count to increase our ranking because users are on the site for considerably longer (now 1hr + per user per webinar).

Is the effort to develop our own webinar software going to increase our google ranking?

Answer 1

The amount of time that users spend on your site after clicking on a webinar link that has been sent to them via email will in no way change your Google rankings. Here is a video by Google's Matt Cutts where he addresses whether or not Google uses Google Analytics data as a ranking factor. The answer is "no".

Google does care about the experience its users have after clicking to your site from the Google search results. If Google sees that many users are bouncing back to the results and looking for other sites, your rankings will fall. Google does measure the time spent on your site between clicking on a search result, and using the back button to the Google search results. Google does use that for ranking purposes.

Answer 2

I don't think that Google have ever stated that bounce rate is a ranking factor.

However, my personal belief is that "click back" rates are a factor, simply because it would be too useful a metric for Google to ignore.

User receives a link 1hr before the webinar starts

In this case, the user isn't actually arriving from Google's search results. Thus, it won't have any affect on your website, simply because click backs cannot be measured.

As Stephen said above: Google does not use Analytics data as a ranking factor. There are many websites out there that use other analytic services.