Javascript to manipulate Google's bounce rate and time on site?
-
I was referred to this "awesome" solution to high bounce rates.
It is suppose to "fix" bounce rates and lower them through this simple script. When the bounce rate goes way down then rankings dramatically increase (interesting study but not my question).
I don't know javascript but simply adding a script to the footer and watch everything fall into place seems a bit iffy to me.
Can someone with experience in JS help me by explaining what this script does?
I think it manipulates the reporting it does to GA but I'm not sure. It was supposed to be placed in the footer of the page and then sit back and watch the dollars fly in.
-
Stephen,
Thanks for the explanation - I just had a client ask me about this script. Based on your explanation, this script will change your bounce rate. This is because once the event is triggered, the visit will no longer be considered a bounce, even if the user only visits one page. So it's an artificial/false decrease in bounce rate, not a "fix" as others claim.
I wrote a short blog post on this (and referenced your description)!
~Adam
-
Thanks for the encouragement Martin.
As it turns out, with the help of the two previous answers, the script is actually based on a valid script adjustment that might actually help some people in their reports but the what my client thought was that this was an easy/quick way to get more traffic. The article they found was saying this would dramatically change results in GA and then directly effect their site's ranking in the SERPs.
They had "proof" in the form of some GA screenshots so I needed more information on what the script actually does. I was able to let my client know what exactly this was and recommend not doing it unless there was a problem in the GA reports that they wanted fixed.
Thanks again for your reply.
-
Dont do it - just improve your content. You know it's wrong to try and cheat the system. Think about what would happen if you banned from the results.
Look i dont mean to be harsh - but i allways balance risks against rewards. In this situation - the risk is to high.
-
Thanks for that link.
The site (link in the previous reply) my client referred me to was manipulating the way they were reporting the results. The closer I looked at it, I realized that it was a little spike but then it went right back down. Knowing them they just paid a bunch of people to visit the site.
This stuff is annoying and gives us SEO's a bad name.
-
The code was from this site http://millionairevolution.com/cut-bounce-rate-by-80/ and looking at the dates and analytics shown on the page this is nothing more than a misrepresentation of the facts and data.
I knew Google doesn't use data from GA but the data graph was showing a contradiction and I didn't know exactly what the script was doing.
-
First, Google Analytics reporting does not, to my knowledge, influence SERP rankings. Altering the data collected through Google Analytics should not affect SEO indicators.
Second, this is from here: http://briancray.com/posts/time-on-site-bounce-rate-get-the-real-numbers-in-google-analytics/
Once this code is installed, your site will update Google Analytics every 10 seconds under the Event Category "Time", the Event Action "Log", and the Event Value will be based on the pattern of 0:10, 0:20, 0:30, 0:40, 0:50, 1:00, 1:10, etc.
The script does not change your bounce rate, it just gives you additional information.
-
You're correct that it's a GA hack. Avoid it.
Google has publicly stated that they don't use your site-specific GA metrics to influence organic search rankings. E.g., they're not taking data from your GA profile, and feeding that to the Search Quality team to determine if your site should rank better or worse. They have MANY better ways to accurately track anonymous user interactions with sites at scale (e.g. Chrome).
The only thing that you'll accomplish with this code is making all of your own internal metrics turn to garbage. Accurate metrics are important. If you bounce rate is high, knowing that allows you to take action to improve your site and reduce it.
The more people who stay on your site for more than 1 pageview, the more money your business is likely to make. Improve your bounce rate to improve the profitability of your website, not for some supposed correlation between bounce rate and organic search ranking.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
404's being re-indexed
Hi All, We are experiencing issues with pages that have been 404'd being indexed. Originally, these were /wp-content/ index pages, that were included in Google's index. Once I realized this, I added in a directive into our htaccess to 404 all of these pages - as there were hundreds. I tried to let Google crawl and remove these pages naturally but after a few months I used the URL removal tool to remove them manually. However, Google seems to be continually re/indexing these pages, even after they have been manually requested for removal in search console. Do you have suggestions? They all respond to 404's. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Tom3_151 -
Can I have an http AND a https site on Google Webmaster tools
My website is https but the default property that was configured on Google WMT was http and wasn't showing me any information because of that. I added an https property for that, but my question is: do I need to delete the original HTTP or can I leave both websites?
Technical SEO | | Onboard.com0 -
Inconsistent page titles in SERP's
I encountered a strange phenomenon lately and I’d like to hear if you have any idea what’s causing it. For the past couple of weeks I’ve seen some our Google rankings getting unstable. While looking for a cause, I found that for some pages, Google results display another page title than the actual meta title of the page. Examples http://www.atexopleiding.nl Meta title: Atex cursus opleider met ruim 40 jaar ervaring - Atexopleiding.nl Title in SERP: Atexopleiding.nl: Atex cursus opleider met ruim 40 jaar ervaring http://www.reedbusinessopleidingen.nl/opleidingen/veiligheid/veiligheidskunde Meta title: Opleiding Veiligheidskunde, MBO & HBO - Reed Business Opleidingen Title in SERP: Veiligheidskunde - Reed Business Opleidingen http://www.pbna.com/vca-examens/ Meta title: Behaal uw VCA diploma bij de grootste van Nederland - PBNA Title in SERP: VCA Examens – PBNA I’ve looked in the source code, fetched some pages as Googlebot in WMT, but the title shown in the SERP doesn’t even exist in the source code. Now I suspect this might have something to do with the “cookiewall” implemented on our sites. Here’s why: Cookiewall was implemented end of January The problem didn’t exist until recently, though I can’t pinpoint an exact date. Problem exists on both rbo.nl, atexopleiding.nl & pbna.com, the latter running on Silverstripe CMS instead of WP. This rules out CMS specific causes. The image preview in the SERPS of many pages show the cookie alert overlay However, I’m not able to technically prove that the cookiescript causes this and I’d like to rule out other any obvious causes before I "blame it on the cookies" :). What do you think?
Technical SEO | | RBO0 -
Roger bot taking a long time to crawl site
Hi all, I've noticed Roger bot is taking a long time to crawl my new site. It started on the 28th Feb 2013 and is still going. There aren't many pages at the moment. Any ideas please? thanks a lot, Mark.
Technical SEO | | caterfor1 -
Can JavaScrip affect Google's index/ranking?
We have changed our website template about a month ago and since then we experienced a huge drop in rankings, especially with our home page. We kept the same url structure on entire website, pretty much the same content and the same on-page seo. We kind of knew we will have a rank drop but not that huge. We used to rank with the homepage on the top of the second page, and now we lost about 20-25 positions. What we changed is that we made a new homepage structure, more user-friendly and with much more organized information, we also have a slider presenting our main services. 80% of our content on the homepage is included inside the slideshow and 3 tabs, but all these elements are JavaScript. The content is unique and is seo optimized but when I am disabling the JavaScript, it becomes completely unavailable. Could this be the reason for the huge rank drop? I used the Webmaster Tolls' Fetch as Googlebot tool and it looks like Google reads perfectly what's inside the JavaScrip slideshow so I did not worried until now when I found this on SEOMoz: "Try to avoid ... using javascript ... since the search engines will ... not indexed them ... " One more weird thing is that although we have no duplicate content and the entire website has been cached, for a few pages (including the homepage), the picture snipet is from the old website. All main urls are the same, we removed some old ones that we don't need anymore, so we kept all the inbound links. The 301 redirects are properly set. But still, we have a huge rank drop. Also, (not sure if this important or not), the robots.txt file is disallowing some folders like: images, modules, templates... (Joomla components). We still have some html errors and warnings but way less than we had with the old website. Any advice would be much appreciated, thank you!
Technical SEO | | echo10 -
Pictures 'being stolen'
Helping my wife with ecommerce site. Selling clothes. Some photos are given by producer, but at times they are not too good. Some are therefore taking their own photos and i suspect ppl are copying them and using them on their own site. Is there anyting to do about this - watermarking of course, but can they be 'marked' in anyway linking to your site ?
Technical SEO | | danlae0 -
What's the best way to deal with an entire existing site moving from http to https?
I have a client that just switched their entire site from the standard unsecure (http) to secure (https) because of over-zealous compliance issues for protecting personal information in the health care realm. They currently have the server setup to 302 redirect from the http version of a URL to the https version. My first inclination was to have them simply update that to a 301 and be done with it, but I'd prefer not to have to 301 every URL on the site. I know that putting a rel="canonical" tag on every page that refers to the http version of the URL is a best practice (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394), but should I leave the 302 redirects or update them to 301's. Something seems off to me about the search engines visiting an http page, getting 301 redirected to an https page and then being told by the canonical tag that it's actually the URL they were just 301 redirected from.
Technical SEO | | JasonCooper0 -
Issue with Joomla Site not showing in SERP's
Site: simpsonelectricnc dot com I'm working on a Joomla website for a local business that isn't ranking at all for any relevant keyword - including the business name. The site is only about six months old and has relatively few links. I realize it takes time to compete for even low-volume keywords, but I think something else may be preventing the site from showing up. The site is not blocked by Robots.txt (which includes a valid reference to the sitemap)
Technical SEO | | CGR-Creative
There is no duplicate content issue, the .htaccess is redirecting all non-www traffic to www version
Every page has a unique title and H1 tag.
The URL's are search-engine friendly (not dynamic either)
XML sitemap is live and submitted to Google WM Tools. Google shows that it is indexing about 70% of the submitted URL's. The site has essentially no domain authority (0.02) according to Moz - I'm assuming this is due to lack of links and short life on the web.
Until today, 98% of the pages had identical meta descriptions. Again, I realize six months is not an eternity - but the site will not even show up for "business name + city,state" searches in Google. In fact, the only way I've seen it in organic results is to search for the exact URL. I would greatly appreciate any help.0