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
-
Increase of non-relevant back-links drop page ranking?
Hi community, Let's say there is a page with 50 back-links where 40 are non-relevant back-links and only 10 are relevant in-terms of content around the link, etc....Will these non-relevant back-links impact the ranking of the page by diluting the back-link profile? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
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 -
Canonicals from sub-domain to main domain: How much content relevancy matters? Any back-links impact?
Hi Moz community, I have this different scenario of using canonicals to solve the duplicate content issue in our site. Our subdomain and main domain have similar landing pages of same topics with content relevancy about 50% to 70%. Both pages will be in SERP and confusing users; possibly search engine too. We would like solve this by using canonicals on subdomain pointing to main domain pages. Even our intention is to only to show main domain pages in SERP. I wonder how Google handles it? Will the canonicals will be respected with this content relevancy? What happens if they don't respect? Just ignore or penalise for trying to do this? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Bounce rate seems to decrease as site climbs the SERP but SERP ranking always drops down after a few days - WHY ?
Like quite a few sites recently we've seen some large fluctuations for our domain the SERPs over the past 6 or so weeks. One thing ive noticed, is that when the site seems to rank higher in the SERPs we get a lower bounce rate. If the sites average across all of its main keywords in #5 the bounce rate is c. 40% (this site is a creative portfolio site, so i guess the niche has a slightly higher bounce rate than normal as you will get some people who click through an notice straight away that the style of the portfolio isnt what they where looking for) But when the sites ranking averages #2-3 the bounce rate tends to be about 25%. (The thing is that we tend to always drop back down after a fews days or so) Has any one else noticed this ?
Algorithm Updates | | jpeg801 -
Does Google Analytics Adjusted Bounce Rate Lead to Increase in Average Time per Visitor?
Hello, I just recently implemented adjusted bounce rate onto one of the websites that I track via google analytics. (http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2322974/How-to-Implement-Adjusted-Bounce-Rate-ABR-via-Google-Tag-Manager-Tutorial) Since doing so, obviously my bounce rate has gone down significantly, nearly half of what it use to be, but I've also noticed an increase in the average time per visitor. In fact, the increase of average time per visitor began the same day I adjusted the bounce rate. Has this happened to anyone else? Can someone please explain why/how this may occur?
Algorithm Updates | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Bounce Rate a factor?
Hi Guys, I've been SEOing two sites for just over 6 months, making very little headway in the process. All the tactics I have employed work on the many other sites that we do SEO work for. I have written pages of rich, useful content, metas, built links from various sources, re-built both sites on a better platform, alt tags are optimised etc etc. This seems to have brought me some success but nothing to write home about. The only major difference I can see between these two sites and my others is bounce rate. The SEO pages I have produced have a fairly healthy bounce rate (20-30%) which isn't a problem, but, both sites have blogs which draw (a lot of) visitors from various social networks and the bounce rate is through the roof (80-90%) obviously increasing the average for the whole site. Now, I know there has been various discussions around this with no real outcome but I cannot see what else it can be. Am I missing something? I should add that both sites are in competitive sectors but not that competitive to stop me seeing at least top 100 results....
Algorithm Updates | | SEOBirmingham810 -
Has Panda update made you lose your ranks but put them back again?
I noticed recently that one of the main sites I run dropped ranks quite heavily across the board. I then noticed that with very link building during the time that the ranks were down (about 1 month) that my ranks went back up again really quickly. All this with very little link building effort, and its the same link building campaign I've been running for a while. So I'm wondering has any been experiencing ranking flux between jan and feb? I know that people reckon if you fix some things your ranks can improve again, but I barley fixed anything on the site and yet it dropped some keywords from 1st page to 3rd page and then back to 3rd page; some keywords went back to original position some were lower but non were higher.
Algorithm Updates | | upick-1623910 -
High bounce rates from content articles influencing our rankings for rest of site
We have a large content article section on our e-commerce site that receives a lot of visits but also have very high bounce rates. We are wondering if this is hurting the rest of our site's rankings. **When I say bounce rates I mean what ever metrics Google is using to determine quality content (specifically after the Panda update). ** We are trying to determine if having the content articles on our domain hurts us. We only have the content articles for link building.
Algorithm Updates | | seozachz0