Bounce rate and rankings
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I have believed for years that a high bounce rate (from search) could lower your rankings over time. Makes sense; if users bounce right back to search after looking at your page Google should think that page wasn't very useful and will push your down the SERPs.
But, how do they determine this? If a user comes back after 30 seconds that's a bounce?
Or is my premise incorrect and Google does not take bounce into account?
Erin
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So they clearly have ways of detecting bounces across a variety of methods (return to SERP, GA, toolbar). I have seen no evidence that they use this directly as a ranking factor. It seems pretty noisy / easily gamed and also not desperately well-correlated with quality (as sometimes if you are just looking for a phone number for example, a bounce is the desired behaviour).
I think they are using usage data of a variety of kinds to measure and improve the algo, but I'm not convinced it factors in directly from bounce rate itself.
Hope that helps.
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Google can see my behavior on non-Google sites if I use the toolbar (may require opting in to see the PageRank data in the toolbar, I'm not sure what data they collect in which situations).
For example, when I still had the toolbar installed, my GWT report for my site indicated that I needed to speed up the wp-admin page of my site. That page isn't in the index, and I'm the only one that accessed it, so I believe that's how they got the data. I don't use the toolbar anymore, and that page now no longer shows up in GWT as something that needs attention.
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How is the toolbar different that a serp? i assume they can track the same stats in both. Curious.
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Google Toolbar is another means that Google has to collect user behavior after a user leaves a Google search result.
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Think about how would you take Bounce into account. IMHO, a negative flag would be : a lot of user click on your result in the SERP results, see your page a very short time, then come back to SERP results and click on the next result.
BUT even then, this can't be applied to the whole algorithm, maybe on very specific types of queries. I wouldn't think too much on this.
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Hey guys, Thanks for the info, but I really interested in the following: do you believe (based on fact, testing) that Ggle takes bounce rate into account in the algos, and if so, how do they do it? There should be a separation between ggle analytics and the search engine, so do they determine it by time?
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When analyzing your bounce rates, make sure you take into account blog and non-blog traffic separately. Blogs are known for a high bounce rate because people often land on them with long tail keywords, find what they want, and navigate away again.
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Logically Google should use bounce rate as one of the factors, but what happens in reality nobody knows. On our personal experience we were managed to decrease bounce rate by 10%, didnt notice any page rank growth or drops.
Aim for 30% bounce rate.
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