Bounce Back or Bounce Through
-
Bounce rate is defined as 'single page visits to a site divided by total visits to the site' as I understand it. It could be argued that a well designed site might vector people on to other sites effectively (I generally use Wikipedia this way for instance). On the other hand a site that bounces people back to where they came from may be genuinely poor. So the questions:
Is the bounce rate really calculated in the stated way by Google?
Is it used, as far as we know, as a metric for the search engine?
What should we do to mitigate the effects of this poor metric?!
thanks,
Mike
-
Actually, bounce rate would be of a concern to search engines, at least for visits that originate from the search engine. The SEs want the users to have a good experience, and if a user clicks on a result and then comes right back to the results page, the SEs may feel that the user did not have a good experience with that result and maybe a different result for that query should be shown.
-
Thanks, yes, it looks from this as if the experts think that Google is doing what we would hope they do and not take account of bounce through. Although of course there may be good reasons for a site not wanting bounce through either (as EGOL notes), it shouldn't be a concern for the search engines
-
As far as I'm aware, Google will use your 'bounce back' rate (where by users return to the search results page straight away) as a search metric as this could indicate whether the site is relevant for that specific search query. This was mentioned in the 2011 SEO Ranking Factors Report.
Hope that helps
-
If search engines are using this data they are certainly only using it for sites competing for the same or similar keywords.
A high bounce rate can be bad or it can be "normal". It would be bad if your site is offensive (and people run away), it can be bad if your site has irrelevant content for the query, it can be bad if your site has thin content, you can probably think of more.
It can be normal if you have a dictionary site and the searcher finds the word, gets the definition and leaves happily.
THE IMPORTANT THING TO DO..... I believe that everyone should be working to reduce their bounce rate and any webmaster should be able to find improvements.
The best way to do it is to have relevant links, obviously placed on every page. For example in the dictionary site your goal should be have linked words within the definition, links to related words adjacent to the definition and links to a few enticing articles along the side.
On an article site you can links within the text to related articles, a "recommended" box of links beside the article and even a few enticing links to "popular" or "related" articles where every one will see them.
Try to reduce your bounce rate by improving your site and making your relevant content visible on every page.
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
-
Google search console: 404 and soft 404 without any back-links. Redirect needed?
Hi Moz community, We can see the 404 and soft 404 errors in Google web masters. Usually these are non-existing pages which are found somewhere on internet by Google. I can see some of these reported URLs don't have any back-links (checked on ahrefs tool). Do we need to redirect each and every link reported here or ignore or marked to be fixed? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
How to take down a sub domain which is receiving many spammy back-links?
Hi all, We have a sub domain which has less engagement for last few years. Eventually many spammy back links pointed to this sub domain. There are relevant back links too. We have deleted most of the pages which are employing spammy content or which have spammy back links. Still I'm confused whether to take this sub domain down or keep it. The confusion between "relevant backlinks might be helping our website" and "spammy backlinks are affecting to drop in rankings"? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Do the referring domains matter a lot in back-links? Google's stand?
Hi, It's a known fact about quality of back-links than quantity. Still domains are heavily different from links. Multiple domains are huge comparing to multiple links. Taking an average, how much does 'number of referring domains" boost website authority? I am not speaking about low quality domains, just number of domains including which are irrelevant to the topic or industry. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Keywords ranks 1 position up for 24 hours or less and gets back to its normal position.
Hi, I don't know if this is strange or just normal thing for some keywords to rank one position up for around 24 hours and get back to its original position. Making it clear to understand, i have these 3 keywords kw1, kw2, kw3 on first page of google on position #3,#3 and #4 respectively. The content of the site is almost static so adding new contents to the site is out of question for now. I noticed that at least 2 times a week those keywords rises to one position above and then gets back to their own normal position. I noticed the serp position change takes place for around 24 hours only.
Algorithm Updates | | MindlessWizard0 -
Website dropping from Page 1 pos 5 to no ranking and then back again?
Hi all, We have a very odd occurrence with a client of ours. It should be noted that they had a penalty recently removed about 2 months ago after much work from our company. Recently they started appearing back on Page 1 Google for a semi competitive keyword term. We were very happy with this and so was the client. The the ranking improved with our work to position 5, which was excellent. Unfortunately what has been happening is they have been dropping out of the rankings completely for this semi competitive keyword for a few days and then reappearing in the same position. The client is checking daily and has noticed. I thought this is just a 'hangover' from the Google penalty and perhaps a one off occurrence, but it has happened about 3 or 4 times now and seems to be happening every couple of weeks. Can anyone shed some light on this behavior? I have checked Webmasters Tools and everything is fine. Thanks Jon
Algorithm Updates | | Jon_bangonline0 -
Whats the best thing to do after rebuilding a site to get old rankings back ?
A website changed its platform from the old one to magento ecommerce. In webmaster tools google says that yesterday was the last time that crawled the site, but the old rankings for keywords are gone , traffic went down big time and now i'm not sure where to start working in order to bring everything like it was. any advice ?
Algorithm Updates | | footballearnings0 -
Yahoo/Bing cache date went back in time
Within 12 hours of submitting a new site to Yahoo/Bing webmasters it was ranking #3 for the primary homepage search term and in the top 5 for about a dozen other. On 7/23 the rankings were steady or climbing with the most recent cache date of 7/21. Now the site only comes up when searching for the domain name with a cache date of 7/11. I launched the site about 14 days ago so I am not expecting results yet but I had never seen this happen so I am just curious if anyone else had.
Algorithm Updates | | jafabel0