Google Ranking, Bounce Rate, Google Analytics

I read somewhere that your site's bounce rate influences your ranking. Last week, when google downranked me from 6 to 8 to 12 I uninstalled Analytics (which had shown a bounce rate of 65 %).
Within a day or two I was back to 6.

In your experience,
- does Google Analytics influence your rank ?
- when is a bounce rate starting to hurt/help you ?

Interestiing. I have observed over the past year that bounce rates on my sites do seem to have an effect on ranking which if you think about it, it should really. We all know the big G has many methods of deciding which sites are providing quality content and I am confident that bounce rates form probably a good indicator of quailty content which engages the reader and thus you are rewarded.

Of course, bounce rates only get triggered once the visitor has navigated from the landing page to some other page on the domain as I understand it, therefore putting something clickable on landing pages to get them moving around your site is a good step forward I guess?

They can track such things with toolbar - not only G Analytics.

I doubt that only bounce rate made this significant influence for your website's rank, however, I believe this is one of the factors they use to qualify your website. At least that's what I have observed from many personal reviews and experience.

Bounce rate/time on site influence rankings. Removing GA will not change anything.

Bounce rate is a user behavior factor of rankings. Although user behavior does not impact search engine rankings as heavy as on-page and especially off-page factors do, it is still counted in Google ranking algorithm. Bounce rate, time on site and other behavior metrics show either your site is sticky or not and are supposed to reflect site's usefulness for its visitors.

However, these metrics alone are not really able to change one's SEPR position dramatically, there are always many other SEO factors involved. That's why uninstalling Google Analytics will unlikely have a dramatic effect, because there are other ways for Google to learn about a site' performance (for instance, Webmaster Tools or visits from SERPs).

More to that, Google Analytics is a really valuable source of data, and if one is not aware of site's performance, traffic sources, conversions and so on - it means some essential information is missing. Of course, there are numerous alternatives to Google Analytics, but it seems there is no reason to complicate things with workaround solutions.

I definitely think bounce rate affects your rankings. Especially if they bounce back to Google (aka pogo-sticking)