Your web site’s bounce rate may be a significant factor in your search engine rankings. If the bounce rate on your site is high, you could end up with lower rankings in the search engines. Correspondingly, lower bounce rates may actually offer meaningful ranking boosts.
10 Comments
10 Comments
Comments
In their investor presentations, Google has articulated its use of user behaivor on results pages as a factor in page rank, so they’re definitley looking at bounce rate in some form. I wonder whether they will ever begin leveraging data from google analytics installed sites. From what I’ve read, they shy away from leveraging analytics data for specific site rankings, but it seems the best source for the data.
They should.
I find ’time on site’ a much better KPI to judge visitor and page quality. You can have a low bounce rate because people immediately click on a link prominently placed on the page. You can have a high bounce rate on a landingpage because all information is on that one page. Looking at time on site would tell the truth in both scenario’s.
Bounce rate speaks much of the expertise of a page with respect to the source that sent the traffic. There is every reason for bounce rate to exist within the ranking algorithm, it makes the ’content is king’ argument much more viable.
I don’t think they should include it. It is far too dependent on the type of site it is. If someone were to click-through to a blog post and spend 5-10 minutes reading the article and finding what they need and leave (which would technically be a bounce), that site shouldn’t be penalized for the user only reading that one page (after all, that was exactly what they were looking for).
Google would need to calculate bounce rate in the algorithm on a query-to-page basis. Up until very recently Matt Inman’s SEOmoz profile page ranked close to #1 for "oatmeal" (it’s on page 2 now). I’m sure every user who was actually looking for information on oatmeal the food bounced right off that SEOmoz page. That page, for that query, probably is not relevant for the majority of users. That doesn’t suggest the page or site lacks relevance or value otherwise.For the "long tail" of search, I don’t see it to be in Google’s interests of resource conservation to calculate bounce rate. I’d be surprised if they weren’t already incorporating it, but I’d expect it to be for a percentage of most-used queries - both because of the availability of statistically significant data and for resource efficiency.
Hmmmm.... dirty signals. More likely to have a home in the personalized aspects not the regular index. Just to be safe we’ll program some bots to start hammering the competition’s bounce rates though... he he... (see my point?)
If bounce rate is going to affect SERPs, then affiliate marketers are going to get murdered by search engines. I think that in most cases, a high bounce rate is a good sign on an affiliate site - it means someone has landed on a page that has the exact product they wanted, which they click on and go to the 3rd party site, and hopefully buy. If those are going to be seen as "negative" attributes, then there are going to be rough times ahead...
As with virtually every other factor, bounce rate would only be one of a multitude of quality/relevance signals.Oh and by the way, even if bounce rate is not part of Google’s algo, it should still fairly high on the list of priorities when analyzing a website/webpage. Unless you have a one-pager, high bounce rates usually signal a major problem.
First you need to define bounce rate. Technically bounce rate is not a function of time as someone mention above, it is a function of someone that comes to your website and DOES NOT visit any other webpage. Yes they could read a blog entry for 5 mintues, then turn their computer off and that would be considered a bounce. In order to calculate time on a website there must be 2 points of reference. It’s like saying today is Dec 10, 2008, so how old am I? You don’t know because you don’t know the date I was born. Same for time on visit and bounce rates. If I visit only one page then there is one one time point.No, let’s assume Google abides by their "Do no harm". How would Google know the bounce rate of a website? Google can measure traffic stats of it’s server but once on my site the stats recorded are mine and only mine. Google does not know how many pages a visitor look at on my site anymore than a competitor could ever know how many visits my site gets because they do not have access to my web stats or logs. I know there are site that do fancy estimates and calculations, but in fact they DO NOT KNOW, they are guessing based on toolbars and trends and surveys (loins and tigers and bears, oh my!)With tab browsing now Google can’t even assume that a search followed by another search and the time between as a bounce rate. I can open the search results link in another tab for reading later, then do another search in the orginal tab and the search time would be very fast, but in fact I am browsing the site I search for first and did not bounce.So, if anyone really feels Google is using bounce rates for ranking then we have two choices:1) Google has an incorrect algorithm based on time between searchs because tab browsing invalidates this.2) Google is doing harm by using website’s Google Analytics data against them.You make the choice.........