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
-
Can Yoast plugin change back old title automatically?
I have a problem with the first page on my website. Im using Wordpress and Yoast SEO plugin. After I have changed and updated some information on the page, I also wanted to change and make a better page title. That I understand is to be changed under pages, by scrolling down to the Yoast setting for the specific page. Is that right? However, I have changed the title over and over again, and asked Google to re-index the page. Everything is fine directly after that. But when I check again after 24-48 hours, the page have automatically changed back to the old title? How is that possible? I´ve tried about 5-10 times, but it does the same thing after 24-48 hours every time. Hope you people with great knowledge can help me out here. 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | Masse0 -
Do back-links to non indexed sub-domains / sub-directories considered by Google as website backlinks and pass Pagerank to website?
Hi, If some noindexed links on our website or sub-domain got some backlinks, will that backlinks pass Pagerank / linkjuice to website? Will they be considered as backlinks to website by Google? Here is a statement from Matt cutts for the question. My question is same as below with answer? Eric Enge: Can a NoIndex page accumulate PageRank? Matt Cutts: A NoIndex page can accumulate PageRank, because the links are still followed outwards from a NoIndex page. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Our Journey back to Good Rankings.
17 year old support site on the topic of hair loss. The home page (and pretty much all internal pages) enjoyed Page 1 Place 1 ranking out of 64 million search results for 12 of those years, for our main search phrase: hair loss. Other internal pages ranked #1 for other search phrases. I believe we were blessed by Google because we did everything the best we could: Genuine, manually constructed, unique, relevant content that was created from the heart. Other generalized health sites linked-to our site for more information on hair loss, and we had a couple thousand back-links that we never had to pay for. For the last 7 years or so, core content and news center went stagnant, but user-driven content (discussion forums) continued chugging along. Very old CMS systems had created duplicate content (print pages, PDF pages, share pages) and the site was not mobile-friendly at all. By the end of 2013, our home page had been bumped to the middle of Page 2 for "hair loss" as Google began pushing us down. Replacing our 700 page site dedicated to the topic of hair loss with random news articles, and dermatology organization sites that had little more than a paragraph of content on the topic. Traffic and income dropped by over 75% with this change, and by 2015 we were looking at a 9 year old site design that wasn't mobile-friendly, and had no updated content outside of the Forums for about as long. Mid 2015 we began a frantic renovation. The store was converted to a mobile-friendly design, tossed into HTTPS, and our developer screwed up, forgetting to put canonicals in place. Soon after, our store rankings dropped to almost zero. By the end of 2015 this was fixed, and we were spending tens of thousands to convert a very large, very old site into WordPress with a responsive, mobile friendly, lightning fast page-load design. We had no Google Analytics data prior to this either. Actions Taken starting Jan 1, 2016 - May 2016: Static Homepage + core content > Now put into WordPress. (80 pages) - proper 301's. News section running a 10 year old "PostNuke" CMS > Now put into WordPress. (300 pages). 301's. Forums running a 5 year old vBulletin > Now put into XenForo. (160,000 pages). 301's. Profiles section running a 10 year old "SocialEngine" CMS > Now put into new SocialEngine. (10,000 pages)* Site moved from HTTP > HTTPS. Proper 301's. Store CMS already finished months prior but sales dropped by 90%. Almost zero. Old forum CMS had created countless duplicate URLs. All of these 410'd. Old forum CMS had 65,000 pointless member profile pages indexed. All 410'd. Old news CMS created 4+ dup pages for every article (print, etc). All 301'd to new Article URL. Our HTACCESS file is thousands of lines long, trying to clean everything up, and redirect everything back to one, accurate, proper URL for each piece of content. It was a lot of work! After 17 years, we obviously had spammy sites linking to us. I quickly deleted content on my site the worst offenders were linking to. Then hired an SEO person to create a disavow audit on the other 20,000 sites liking to us. He settled on around 300 URLs needing disavow, but commented that didn't see any evidence we'd been penalized by Panda. He finished Friday and we will submit disavow Monday. Ran Screaming Frog audit on the site Cleaned up Google Search Console fully Created properties and submitted new sitemaps there. Monitored each property for the last 3 months and addressed 100% of issues raised. Revived Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and Instagram Accounts. Began publishing new content in our /news/ section and cross-posting to Social Media. Began improving up our Title Tags in the Forums as they often were pointless: "Hi! Need help!?" **Despite this, nothing has helped. Nothing has budged. Our traffic hasn't moved an inch since January. Sales have dropped 90% and site income has almost dried up. ** I have taken out a $25,000 personal loan just to cover my mortgage and pay my bills while I attempt to identify what's going wrong, and how to fix it. It bought me about 3 months, and that 3 months is almost up. I hired 2 or 3 different SEO experts with varying levels of experience. Due to no Google Analytics data to draw on, none of them could come up with any specific explanations for our drop in ranking over the last 4 years. That's why I took the approach to just "do everything" to fix all problems identified, and then cross my fingers. It hasn't worked. As of today our home page is not even found in google for our main search phrase: hair loss. Its simply not there. At all. And the only thing that is ranking is our forums, ranked at "67", which is horrible. But I don't understand why a site that was doing so well for over a decade has now been completely dropped from Google, without a single notice in Console or otherwise, explaining any problems. I realize this is a massive undertaking, and an equally massive post. But any time you can spend helping me will be forever appreciated.
Algorithm Updates | | HLTalk0 -
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 -
Back to result after manual action revoked
Hello, Two weeks ago we got message from Google which said about our reconsideration request has been sucesfuly processed after few months of fight. So, manual action has been revoked but our problem is more complex. Here are flow: 1. 1-01-2012 we got filtered (manual filter - buy link) Here are 100k vistors per day... 2. 7-05-2012 we have problem with budget, hosting, etc.. Before that (after get filter) we get 20k vistors per day.. 3. 12-07-2012 we back Our statistics at this moment: 10-12k vistors per day, so we make 301 from country domain to global *.com 4.12.07-2012 - 1-09-2012 We try make a good reconsideration request without any positive result... Our statistics after 301 redirect are 5k vistors per day, not more. Every day is : 5 000 (+/- 5 %) 5.14-12-2012 Our reconsideration request has been procesed positive, manual action has been revoked but... after two weks from this message we have the same statistics (still are the same traffic source precentages). So whats going on? When will be back to SERP? Thanks! It's very important for us, before we got filter our statistics are permanent good. At this moment we don't see result for "keyword domainame" in TOP 10, only positions > 50 sometimes are normal (1-2 % of queries). Our competition have good statistics all time, their pages are above our results for phrases like: "keyword domainame"
Algorithm Updates | | thenaturat0 -
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 -
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 -
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
Algorithm Updates | | ErinTM0