If a page bounces in the woods, can Google Panda hear it?

[TheDude]

I have read that after the Panda update a site's bounce rate is an important ranking metric.  However, can anyone confirm whether all pages count equally?  For instance, my home page gets 5000% more traffic than Deep Page X.  If Deep Page X has a poor bounce rate, does it matter as much as if my Homepage has a bad bounce rate?

I am guessing not, but wanted to open it up for discussion.

If not, it has me wondering on what to do for some of my database driven content.  I have some dynamically created pages that have higher bounce rates and minimal unique content.  They aren't pure spam or junk, but are likely only about 1% unique from one another.

Sounds like a no brainer change post-Panda, right?  Well, what if I was the only one targeting the keywords for these pages?  The pages pull from info I stored on the U.S. government stimulus program (related to my industry).  It then has just about every city, state and county combo in the country for my product.  For instance, a page <title>might be "Flemington, NJ Widgets - Somerset County".  Something that no one else is targeting and drives minimal traffic.</p> <p> </p> <p>Do I take this content down?  I didn't have any affects, positive or negative from Panda, so I am hesitant to take down thousands of Google cached pages.</p></title>

[LuminInteractive]

I think there's something to be said for trimming the fat from a site. I personally didn't get hit by panda but from the folks I've spoken to, this is one of the main things they've done to have the penalty lifted. Either that, or increase the value of deep pages, i.e. link to them and focus the content.

But I def. agree in terms how panda takes bounce rate into account.

[TheDude]

That makes sense!  I suppose I should stay put for now and just continue to make the content better and better rather than removing anyting that might have value.

[Highland]

Bounce rate, in regards to Panda, refers to how you bounce in relation to a given search, not how many people bounce from your page overall.

Let's say I search "blue widgets" and your site has a page on "government funded blue widgets". I might not be looking for that so I bounce back and go to the next page, which sells blue widgets. I never come back to Google so Google goes "Hmm, they didn't like my #1 choice for blue widgets, maybe I need to change that" and so your page loses relevance for that term. Remember, Google wants people to be happy with their SERPs and if people keep bouncing from page to page, that's not good for them. It's unclear as of yet whether or not this behavior, repeated on most of your pages, can affect your overall authority or rank, but I haven't seen anything conclusive to say it does. I think sites experiencing site-wide devaluation are either suffering from some other issue or they were ranking well for a lot of terms that they shouldn't have been.

My rule of thumb on content is that, unless it's duplicate, it shouldn't be removed.