Being one to ignore bounce rates, I didn’t really care how long people stayed on my page. As long as I had any visitors I was happy. Last April I even wrote a particularly vehement article against bloggers whining about bounce rates. Since then new evidence has come out and I’m ready to change that opinion. If you care about how you rank in search engines, you should worry about bounce rates.
Below are three well written articles that document the effects of bounce rates on SEO:
- Do Search Engines Use Bounce Rate As A Ranking Factor?
- Confirmed: Bounce Rate is A Search Engine Ranking Factor
- Google bounce factor research data is in
After reading through the above posts I came to the same conclusion as the authors. Google is using analytic data to punish sites with high bounce rates in their rankings. There is no point in removing the Google Analytics code either, since Google mines data from so many places.
Quite a diliemma. On one hand we encourage fly by night visitors who drop in for a second or two. By doing so we may be lowering our Search Engine rankings, thereby making it harder to find our site for those who may be truly interested in our content.
Why even care? It depends on your site’s income model, if any. For those sites supporting themselves through paid posts, then social traffic is fine. Fluff your numbers and get that page rank up to 3. If you have no website income, search engine rankings don’t really matter.
For sites depending on Adsense, the opposite is true. Try to limit the visits from untargeted social traffic. It isn’t helping you at all. Those truly interested in your keywords are the ones who will most likely click an ad. If you use SEO rather than paying for Adwords, a high search engine ranking is money in the bank. Not to mention the threat of the dreaded “smart pricing”.
Below is a quote from Digital Inspiration directly from an AdSense Representative:
I’m sure you know that Smart Pricing affects on an account level rather than affecting a particular website, based on it’s performance. Your website is an established blog, with quality traffic, and the chance of it getting Smart Priced is very low. However, if you associate a new blog with your account, there is no guarantee on how it is going to perform, and based on that your account may or may not get Smart Priced.
Please factor in both these points, before you make a decision. If you are confident that the new blog will be akin to yours i.e. it will have great content, have quality traffic, and as a web property, it will be beneficial to our advertisers, then chances of it being threatened by Smart Pricing are very low.”
Quality Traffic? As much as one can argue that bounce rates and blogs make no sense, if it means a few more dollars per check, then I’m willing to experiment on lowering my bounce rate.
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I have often thought that my high bounce rate was somehow working against me, but other than the dreaded “click here to continue reading” trick, I’m not sure what else to do. I will be very interested to find out the results of your “experimenting” – and I presume as usual you’ll share with us your conclusions and any tips and tricks. Great topic. I’ll stay tuned.
Great article! My bounce rate is about 87% (according to Google) 65% (according to my stats counter). Here’s the question: I get between 10-20 very specific Google searches for my site. They come and spend less than 5 seconds and bounce right off. If they would have spent just a little time, they would have had an answer to their search. For example, I did an article on Feline Stomatitus. I get 2-3 people a day coming from Google for this specific search, but they don’t stay. I guess it could be because I have a blog and not a regular site. Short version, I have people come to my site using very search-specific terms, they would find their answer, but do not stay long enough to page down and find what they were looking for. What can I do to change this?
Is a bounce where the visitor returns to the previous page without clicking on any of your links, or where the visitor only generates one pageview?
My bounce rate is 86% on one site, 75% on the other.
John: The articles in questions all used Google’s definition of Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page. Bounce rate is a measure of visit quality and a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. You can minimize Bounce Rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy.
So in the case of my own blog, visitors who only visit the main page, but do not click on the article to read the comments or leave one of their own probably count as a bounce.
At least that is the goal I will be focusing on, increasing user interaction at my site.
It does seem that those guys who have for a long time, been saying that the EC droppers are just doing them a disservice, might just have been correct. Allow me to apologise to all those guys on whose sites I have just dropped and ran in the past.
No need to apologize, that’s the nature of that system, drop and run.
Damn, I just checked analytics and lo and behold I see a similar pattern as the pics from that black hat seo site, when I’m comparing the bounce chart and search engine visits. When the bounce dipped down, the SE visits peaked on the same days.
I never would have noticed or thought to compare the two specifically.
Thank you, Turnip. Going to experiment with this and keep an eye on my decreasing involvement with EC specifically.
My blog have an average bounce rate of 81.44% but I still rank nicely for many of the key words phrase for my flash games walkthroughs articles.
Are you saying that I will lose those nice search engine results page ranking if my bounce rate continues to go up?
Deimos: I guess in your case your bounce rate might be better than other’s who rank for the same keywords. “Purple faced guy” isn’t googled all that often anyway.
@Turnip:
Aaaaaaaaah you turnip joker!
I am not competing for that key phrase anyway. :p
I have some single page sites, so I guess their bounce rates would be pretty high!
E.g. http://assemb.atspace.com
I guess Google can’t detect a visitor opening the .txt files. I suppose one solution would be to replace the .txt files with some nice html pages.
I too wrote a post about bounce rates where I said I didn’t care about the rates just as long as I got traffic. How foolish I was.
I began analyzing my traffic more, scrutinizing it you can say, and now my thoughts have changed as well. My offbeat emails blog bounce rates are decreasing, people are actually hanging around longer and going through some of my other posts. This has occurred naturally and I am pleased.
My goal for January is to see it drop below the 69% that is at now.
Thanks for keeping me informed.
My bounce rate for social media is pretty good. My StumbleUpon bounce rate is 40%, which is lower than almost everything else.
I have a large “oh wow, that’s cool” factor working for me and that translates into a low bounce rate for new visitors.
Good info. So many bloggers who are trying to make money blogging seldom spend any time thinking about the bounce rate.