FWIW, mail service Campaign Monitor have picked up on this as possibly true, while stopping short on actually advising people to make list changes as a result:
That's not what the blog entry at campaign monitor says at all.
> Personally, I haven't seen or heard of any evidence to back up this claim, beyond the anecdotal - as yet, there is no official information from Google linking email reputation to search results.
All the campaign monitor blog post says is that if it's true it has interesting implications.
Hence 'possibly' - they thought it relevant enough to share, even in its unconfirmed state. Sorry if I made that more ambiguous than it should've been...
CM seem to be pretty good at taking a long term view of how to do email marketing given a lot of their own marketing targets white label types (small agencies, etc.)... Often the same people managing websites. That said, there must be a slight conflict in their desire to keep list sizes up (check out http://www.campaignmonitor.com/pricing/ for why) in the short term.
Why wouldn't Google use data they have to improve quality? I'm not convinced they're doing it as the post reports, and there are probably privacy ramifications (like, oh my gosh, Google actually read my email I host with them for more than targeted ads?), but it doesn't take a lot of mental gymnastics to arrive at what the post suggests as yet-another-metric for page ranking.
In terms of its relative value, though, to what extent could Google Apps/Gmail users be deemed "typical" searchers if this were occurring?
Ros from Campaign Monitor here - I've just updated the post based on Matt's contribution above.
It would have been very unwise to recommend that any sender (not just our customers) change how they manage their lists based on an anecdotal report, thus we really did stress that there was no evidence at this stage to back up the claims in the original Lockergnome post.
By all means our customers are welcome to clean, or segment their email subscriber lists as they see fit. However, there are some sound reasons why we don't recommend this - http://help.campaignmonitor.com/topic.aspx?t=54
(To clarify for others, 'inactive' in this context means 'does not open campaigns' - unlike bounces, which do get automatically removed from lists)
That said, list management isn't the topic at hand - it's relationship between reputation and Google rank.
Their point is totally valid. There is no way reliable way to know who DOESN'T open your emails. You can get a list of who definitely opened your email AND said "OK to loading images and/or clicked on a link in the email. But if they don't load images and/or don't click on a link, you have no idea if they opened your email or not. Maybe they're a privacy nut, so they're read your email then type in your website's URL into your browser instead of clicking the link in your email (because they know you or someone is tracking who clicks on what).
Assuming that it is true that Google is NOT linking the two together, I see no reason to delete subscribers that APPEAR inactive.
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/3486/do-email-newsl...