There is a post at SEO Blackhat that shows that bounce rate is really a factor in search engine ranking. In the post there are screen shots of Google analytics data from a site. If you study the screen shots you will see that there is a "pattern you would expect from a program designed to flush out terms with higher bounce rates and test them across other sites", according to that poster in SEO Blackhat.
What exactly is bounce rate and how does it figure in ranking? Well, in Google analytics support page it says that bounce rate "is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page. Bounce rate is a measure of visit quality and a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. You can minimize Bounce Rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy."
Now, is it time to worry about bounce rate? I think we've been worrying about it long enough. If this is the first time for you to hear about this term, don't mind because all you have to do is to find the best way to keep visitors stay longer in your site. If you have good content then you need not worry about things like this.
What exactly is bounce rate and how does it figure in ranking? Well, in Google analytics support page it says that bounce rate "is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page. Bounce rate is a measure of visit quality and a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. You can minimize Bounce Rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy."
Now, is it time to worry about bounce rate? I think we've been worrying about it long enough. If this is the first time for you to hear about this term, don't mind because all you have to do is to find the best way to keep visitors stay longer in your site. If you have good content then you need not worry about things like this.
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8 Responses to “Bounce Rate is Really a Factor in Search Engine Ranking”
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Yap meron ngang nag experiment with the bounce rate.. marami na rin akong nakikita na nag-apply na ng principle na yan..
November 22, 2008 at 4:32 AMSo, if you have to rank well, kailangan tanggalin mo ang blog mo doing ECs, SUs, Diggs... :-(
as of now the average lenght of stay of visitors in my blog is 1:02 minutes, i guess it is not that bad. The best thing to do is to continue with EC, SU, Digg seeing to it that my content is interesting enough.
November 22, 2008 at 2:25 PMpero marami pa ring power droppers sa EC. i'm giving up with my bounce rate (less than 1 minute) hehehe.
November 22, 2008 at 5:14 PMhey guys! what do u use to measure bounce rate? I have searched last time to measure mine but i could not find any tool.. i only have alexa data on averae page views but it is not useful...
November 23, 2008 at 10:35 AMhow did you measure the average stay of a site visitor? I have been devising ways to reduce my BR too, because at times, though the content is indeed interesting, but who cares??? The important thing is, both being interesting and when searched by those searches in search engines, that is the only good way i see people staying out to read...
and of course the ones who exchange comments with me all the time, although the favors are mutual, we stayed at each others' page when we give out comments and we also read each other's entry.
@Calvin
November 23, 2008 at 4:45 PMjust continue posting good articles and forget about bounce rate.
@WebbieGurl
I use Google analytics and sitemeter
@WebbieGurl
November 23, 2008 at 4:49 PMadditional input. yes, you are correct in saying that even if you have good content no one cares except those who comment to your posts and who are doing it because you do it to them also. this is because we have so much information floating around the net, we have information overload, too many info, too little time.
That's the reason Entrecard is bad for bounce rate because people just drop and then leave. The bounce rate for my sites that I have Entrecard on used to be very good, people were spending time in the sites, but now, the rate is very high, (ie bad like over 80% or something like that). But then, my PR is ok (3 for the new one and 4 for the old one - although the old one used to have a PR of 6) but I am not complaining. Both don't earn.
November 23, 2008 at 5:35 PMThanks for this post and the comments. I had never heard of this before. However, my blog is mostly a mirror for my audio podcast, which most people just subscribe to from iTunes anyway. However I will now give some thought to the time people spend at my site, like this, and what it means for me.
November 24, 2008 at 3:35 AM~Andy, in New York (very early in the morning)
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