I'm starting a new niche site, and would like to preserve my visitors' privacy for those to whom that's an important issue. For that reason, I'd like to leave out as many third-party tracking links as possible.<p>According to one of the big SEO firms[1], the top three ranking factors that Google uses are:<p>1) direct website visits
2) time on site
3) pages per session<p>To measure these, it seems to me a site would either have to ping back to Google on every page hit, or else the user's browser (i.e., Chrome) would have to do it for them.<p>Chrome stores it's users browser history on Google's servers[2], so they know this data for all logged-in users. But it can't track non-logged-in users, nor users of other web browsers.<p>If I leave off my GA code, Google won't be able to measure these three metrics for many visitors. Won't that hurt my web site ranking?<p>[1] - https://www.semrush.com/ranking-factors
[2] - https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/privacy/index.html#browser-modes