[alberth]

> So I proposed to the owner of the company, I would create a "Click Faker". It would go to google on your local PC, it would then search for a term you wanted to rank, then it would navigate the top 10 pages, if it found you, it would click your link, then spend 2-5 minutes navigating around your site before closing the window.

Dumb question: how would google know you spent 2-5 minutes on that domain and navigated around it?

[jermaustin1]

Your site needed 2 or 3 things to work: Ranking in the top 100 results of Google Search, then Google AdSense and/or Analytics for this to fool Google.

[nickphx]

If you're hoping to participate in the SEO game, you have to utilize google's javascript analytics code. Their code collects and reports on a variety of user activity. It's safe to assume (based on google published articles [1]) that the data collected is used to influence the site's rankings.

1. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9205520?hl=en

[awavering]

You don't need to install Google Analytics to rank on Google.

The article you cited mentions CRUX data[1], which comes from the Google Chrome browser, not Google Analytics. That data is reported to website users in the form of the Core Web Vitals report, which is a different product than Google's ranking algorithm. Although similar data is probably used as a ranking factor, you can't conclude that from this support documentation.

1. https://developer.chrome.com/docs/crux/

[forgotmypw17]

One way they can tell is whether they see you on the search results page again, or if they see you click another result on the search results page.