Google question

Hey guys.. i have this on my mind for some time. I'm thinking about google rankings and google analytics. Does anybody know something about connection between these two? For example - google says that he loves original, readable, authoritative content. OK. But how the google can say that "some" content is authoritative and readable. I have read recently, that along with other factors (backlinks, citations, etc) google analyses bounce rate and time spent on reading the content and counts them to overal serp performance. But how google can know these factors? Only if you have google analytics on your page. So if you have not so valuable content on your site and installed analytics, you are snitching on yourself. Or is there any other way for google to know bounce-rate and other metrics?
So would it be better to switch to other analytics tools?

What do you guys think? (Sorry for my english

Asystematic,

Google can (I'm assuming) gather data about click through rates from its SERP's but I'm not sure about bounce rates. I suppose it is anyone's guess if they actually use data from analytics (bounce rate for a site for example) to determine if that particular property is engaging. That being said, bounce rate is not always an indicator that content is or is not engaging. The structure of the website, the content on the page, and other factors influence this metric and sometimes it can be downright useless in terms of determining engagement with content. Case in point, if a blog only has one page, it will have a high bounce rate because there are no other pages to visit. People could spend an hour reading stuff on the blog and if there is only one page, it will look like no one likes it. That may be an extreme example but it illustrates that metrics cannot be viewed in isolation.

On your question as to how Google can tell you have poor content, there are signals that can give them a pretty good idea. Of course they do not make this known so no one can really say definitively "this is how Google tells your content is good". They have however divulged information over the years about examples of web pages that their algorithm has targeted as spam or poor content. For instance if the links and anchor text in your content have nothing to do with the content itself, this is a signal that it may not be the most authoritative or well-designed content for users.

This post illustrates my point,

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html

Best,

Shawn