Bounce rate and rankings
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
How is the toolbar different that a serp? i assume they can track the same stats in both. Curious.
-
Google Toolbar is another means that Google has to collect user behavior after a user leaves a Google search result.
-
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.
-
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?
-
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.
-
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.
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
-
Its the 21st April, and my non responsive page is still ranking the same ?
Hi, As you know the new algorithm is due today, can anybody confirm why my site wouldn't appear to be affected as yet? Cheers
Algorithm Updates | | CFCU0 -
Ranking under a non-geobased, one word phrase
We have a local client who would like to score under the words "locksmith" and "locksmiths". What is the best way to get him to rank organically and not just in Google Plus Local for those keywords?
Algorithm Updates | | GregWalt0 -
Trying to recover from a ranking crash
My site was well established and I'd built up some good rankings in Google using link building and onsite optimization. Then last year it completely fell out of the rankings except for a few keywords. There were some suspicious links but nothing that seemed too toxic, no warnings from Webmaster Tools. 9 months later I still haven't recovered. The site is well optimized. Any ideas?
Algorithm Updates | | Infogenix0 -
Decline in ranking for a particular theme of keywords after Penguin 2.0
Hi everyone Last month we found on of our clients rankings were seeing significant declines in ranking (like from 3 to 28). This occurred around the time of the Penguin 2.0 update. After further investigation we found that only a collection of keywords were affected. If we were hit by the algorithm update we would expect to find all keywords declining. We have not been manually penalized and other keyword themes are seeing moderate day to day ranking improvements. I know that rankings jump from day to day but a sudden decline of around 20 places for a theme of keywords isn't what we would expect. Thanks all.
Algorithm Updates | | PeteW0 -
Ranking effected by Penguin 2.0
Hello Everyone, I am amazed to see that all the ranking of keywords got down after Penguin webspam algorithm updated on May 22, 2013. Is there any suggestion how we will recover and get the ranking back. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | lucidsoftech0 -
Ranking factors
I found this page: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors Is there any new page with more up to date data ? Thank you i.
Algorithm Updates | | iivgi0 -
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
Algorithm Updates | | SKE0 -
What's the best way to discover which search terms competitors are highly-ranked for?
I'd like to know for which search terms competitors appear in the top 10, but I haven't found an efficient way to do so. Any help is appreciated...thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | actionagainsthunger0