It is known that Google actually uses Analytics data in rankings.
(Eric Enge: Right, indeed. What about the toolbar data, and Google analytics data? Matt Cutts: Well, I have made a promise that my Webspam team wouldn’t go to the Google Analytics group and get their data and use it. Search quality or other parts of Google might use it… - Eric Enge Interviews Google’s Matt Cutts)
And if they do use it, they certainly look for quality signals in it, both negative and positive, that may influence how they assign a value to and rank that particular site.
One such signal might be the distribution of traffic sources for that site. Does traffic come from several different types of sources? Does it come mainly from search engines? Mainly from Google?
If the latter is the case, it may create a ceiling for that site in terms of rankings.
After all, why would Google choose to promote a site even further when it already receives most of its traffic from them? A percentage like the one below basically says, If it wasn’t for us (i.e. Google), you wouldn’t even be in the game.
This is pure speculation, obviously. But it certainly won’t hurt to “dilute” that high concentration and push Google’s share down.
One effective way is to advertise the site off-line. It would bring in direct traffic, and direct traffic is probably considered a positive signal. Why? Because that includes bookmarks and type-in traffic, which usually comes to authority sites, quality content and strong brands.
Funnily, even the Live.com referral spam issue may be helpful in this respect, as it reduces Google’s share in the traffic source pie. With the added benefit (for Microsoft) that it not only obfuscates statistics for webmasters, it does the same for Google’s own Analytics data.
