Bounce rates affects ranking!

Wht is Bounce rate? Bounce rates can really affect SERPs what's your share about it?

 

Bounce rate (sometimes confused with exit rate) is a term used in web site traffic analysis. It essentially represents the percentage of initial visitors to a site who "bounce" away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site.

The formula used to calculate bounce rate is:
Bounce Rate = Single Page Access/ Entries

To get more information, click here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounce_Rate

 

No. bounce rate dont affect the SERP but it will affect your click rate or conversion rate

 

Bounce rate = single page access. means indicate to you that user did not view or stay on ur site. it does not effect on SERPS, but as lifeplayer replied, i will effect you click rate or conversion rate

 

Bounce rate means how many people hit your site then leave immediately. None of the search engines say that the use bounce rate as part of their organic search algo, but it makes sense that they would. Think about it, if someone is clicking on a site and leaving immediately it means they have not found what they are looking for, search engines want to serve results that give customers what they are looking for. The next time someone is looking for the same thing they may want to offer a more "sticky" result, where the person stays on the site.

The short answer bounce rate is not currently used in search ranking, but it may be in the future.

 

If your bounce rate has high percentage that means bad. In my opinion a good bounce rate would be 25% or lower, the best of course is zero.

 

Bounce rate do not affect ranking of website but its provide information on your traffic quality. If you are having high bounce rate it means that visitors do not found your site good they do not found what they want. Or i can say you are not getting targeted traffic.

 

I am not sure it affects click rate....

 

i'm pretty sure that bounce rate will have a small influence on ranking. if you click back to your search results from the page you landed on, google probably notes this. if it happens a lot, it will think your content is low quality.

 

How can you say that with such certainty only google can say for sure. With GA they have access to a lot of data, so it could be a factor you don't know. In any case, having a site with a high bounce rate is of concern.

 

This is definitely has nothing to do with rankings in my opinion. Bounce rate can affect the sales of the site but not with rankings.

 

It could also be the other way round. I might have found exactly what I wanted on that page, and therefore left the page there after taking in the information.

 

I think bounce rate might have an effect on rating. I used to buy traffic from traffic exchange before adsense, and my bounce rate was very high. Since them, I do more targeted traffic from classified ads posting, and my bounce rate is reduced and my SERP is improved. Also, install Google toolbar on all computers you have and keep it on your site, I think that might make Google believe that users are staying longer on the site and having low bounce rate. Just my theory on Google using behavior as small part in their ranking algorithm.

 

Matt Cutt's and others at Google have stated that Bounce Rates do NOT affect your rankings. Metrics like these are too 'spammable' to be a good ranking metric. I could get me and a bunch of friends to simple search on a term, click on my competitor, and bounce back to Google repeatedly day after day and hurt their rankings.

Google may track bounce rates (I know they do for paid) but they have stated it is not being used and won't be used for organic rankings because of the reason I listed above.

 

Let's be clear though too. Google most definitely takes into account bounce rate, but perhaps not for rank purposes, but it is clear to a search engine that the engine wants to return SERPs based on merit in relation to a keyword or phrase. So, if a bounce rate is very high, that will send the message to the search engines that the combination of search to site visit is off. Either that, or the site has a very low usability factor. Also, keep in mind that a bounce is collected even if a person visits one page and sits on it for 3 seconds or 30 minutes. I am not saying bounce has a heavy hand in returning SERPs, but it plays a role in the search engine's algorithm one way or another. To get too spammy with having friends click to a site and jump day after day wold come into play if you could change your IP from visit to visit. Google notes IPs all day long, 8 days a week.

 

I don't think bounce rates affect ranking. Bounce rate can affect the sales of the site. A bounce occurs when a web site visitor leaves a page or a site without visiting any other pages before a specified session-timeout occurs.

 

Mat Cutts made it clear in a video back in February that his department and the Analytics team don't share information. I think it would be great in the future if they did. A website with a high bounce rate simply means they are getting the wrong type of traffic. If you truly optimize your site for what you offer you will have a low bounce rate.
As far as Yahoo and MSN, unless you have their toolbar there really isn't a way for them to know your bounce rate unless they use the same stats as Alexa, which is way off.

 

A high bounce rate can also come from having products on Google Base, shop.com and other areas where ctr might be high but the bounce rate is also.
A LOT of people window shop and do price comparison. So if they come directly to your product, the price is gathered and they are off to the next site.
I believe the average conversion rate for products is about 1%-2%. That leaves a lot of room for bouncing.

 

SEs cannot know the bounce rate of all sites, I think. For example, if I use Google Analytic, then Google can know about bounce rate, but how will Yahoo know? And if I do not use Google Analytic, then how will Google know my site's bounce rate?

I guess bounce rate do not or cannot affect ranking of a site.

 

I guess they can find out, because when people search on yahoo and click back button, they're back on yahoo, so they will know that the site wasn't that interesting for the search query.