Good Link VS Bad Bounce Rate what wins?

[jtay123]

Hi all, this is only my second question on SEOmoz since becoming a member over three months ago so sorry if it’s a little bit basic.

As small part of one of our websites promotion we have been giving really good advice on good authority blogs/forums related to our product website.

One of the sites we have offered advice on is from a US website and we added a link to our guide for the problem to our UK site.

In hindsight the product solution is not branded the same in the US so our bounce rate is over 90%.

So the question is when is a link from a related site not worth the high percentage bounce rate?

[AlanBleiweiss]

John,

I applaud you for already doing as much as you have been regarding providing value when you post to forums and blogs.  That alone is a big deal.  So now it's just about tuning the process.

[jtay123]

Hi Alan

Thanks for the fast response and as always the great reception I am finding from the community.

I probably thought as much as in the link was not worth the bounce rate, but in all honestly I did not realise it was a US site at the time.

I use a search to find forums/blogs relevant to our site topic and offer sound advice for the problem related to the question (sometimes with a link). As a small part of our marketing this really has got some great results especially when other people in the forum back the advice up with their own experience.

Really will take more care in the future to make sure the advice is really relevant to the user.

[AlanBleiweiss]

John,

Welcome to the Moz community!  The more questions people ask, regardless of skill level, the better the quality of the work and the more everyone wins...

Generally speaking, high bounce rates due to people not finding what they expect is not worth the effort to get a link.  The bigger the site the link comes from (and in turn, supposedly, the more clicks on that link), the more negative the impact of that bounce rate will be.

Not only do you send negative signals to search engines regarding relevance, you do so because it's a bad user experience.

This is why obtaining high quality links needs to factor in relevance and stickyness after click.

If it's just one link, it's not so critical usually, because it's not reflective of a larger pattern.  However if you can get that link changed to point to more relevant content, that would help.  Otherwise, move on and focus more on the quality of the site the content is on, combined with the page it's pointing to.