I appreciate your comment about honesty. I try to give my opinion without sugar coating things. If I’m wrong, I’ll try to correct my mistakes.

This is the bottom line.

I am not going to want to hang out out of obligation, then what next? I have to click on some ads out of obligation?

Not all Entrecard member sites are good. EC does not discriminate from what I have seen. If it’s not blatant spam or porn, everyone can come in…

I liked the analogy about “Only 20% of the people who looked in my shop window came in.”

If my writing or content is no good? I WANT to know with high bounce! I WANT to know the truth so that I can improve something! Why does no one look at it this way?

I think it’s a very reasonable way to look at it.

And for the record, Turnip - my pal - I think that your honesty does a service. If we can look at things HONESTLY and without pretense, then we can figure out the truths of situations.

If HONESTLY bouncing is why my site does best, then perhaps EC shouldn’t be employed by me. Seriously. I know I have decent traffic on searches and I’m not shabby in SEOing but, again, if I’m trying to get a following through EC and it’s not working, why whine.

Either readjust my perception or readjust my strategy. Anything else is blowing in the wind and wasting time.

The same crybabies about bounce rate are the same ones whoring the marketing section with their “Monday Stumble, Tuesday Stumble, Wednesday Stumble” posts. Don’t you think Stumblers will hit the same back button when they see your crap doesn’t interest them?

I LOVE that! I almost said that I don’t understand why it’s chic to complain about EC, but you’re right. A-Listers start the ball rolling and their sheep follow. The biggest cry-baby is the one in the comments of the A-Listers post kissing ass then going back to their blog to try to imitate that day’s post. Gah!

I do actually read a lot of the sites that I drop on even if I’m only slightly interested (saying this because if I can learn something I didn’t know before then I become slightly interested). I read about the “Big guys” and how this person and that person wants to be like them and then LAUGH because they fail miserably. Then the wannabes start with the torches and pitch forks just hoping to get noticed. Does this really work?

At any rate, bounce rates are just not something worth crying about. Honestly, what if all of your traffic came from search engines, the visitors only visited one page, BUT they left via an ad. Would the bounce rates matter then? Hmmph.