Bounce rate and SERPs position

Hi all,

I was wondering if anybody here has witnessed that a high bounce rate on their website has affected their SERPs position.

I've read in a few places that Google doesn't like a high bounce rate?

Thanks for any advice

 

Mine's about 44% and no I have not noticed whether or not the highly affects my SERPS because it doesn't change at a high variance - Google may place some value on the time spent on your site and unique visitors that come but I'm not too sure about it.

 

Thanks huiz,

What's the best way to measure bounce rate do you think?

 

Last I heard from Matt Cutts in his youtube video posts, Google does not currently use analytics data in their ranking algorithm

 

Googlele analytics

 

SERP (Search Engine Result Page) is a listing of webpages shown by a search engine like Google when a query for a search is made. This query is the keyword searched by the user and the results are the webpages which the search engines considers best optimized for the keyword. The position in SERP plays a great role in deciding the total revenue generated by the company. The total revenue generated by a website on first position on a result page can be about 14 times as compared to the one located at tenth position. Below are some stats about SERP according to a study:

 

Bounce rate does not effect the SERPs ranking because Google gives importance to the links only and ranking depends on links.If you have more number of links, then you can get good ranks.

 

Really google give importance to uniuqe visitor at your website...... I have never seen advantage of bounce rate

 

I doubt about this. If google tracks your bounce rate with google analytics you used on your site, it may learn that high bounce rate means poor quality content or less important content. It may affect your SERP. I am not sure, but i think so.... what you think??

 

I've actually just found this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgBw9tbAQhU&feature=related (I can't post live links yet) - Matt Cutt's response to a similar question

Still seems strange to me though that they wouldn't consider a really high bounce rate to be an indication from users that the site is not relevant to their search query...


Is Google Analytics the only way to measure bounce rate, or ar their other tools (or maybe within Cpanel)?

 

You can use Alexa as well provided your site has high enough ranking for its stats to be measured. I agree with you Cam - if a site has a 95% bounce rate I think it should have lesser value than a 50% or 30% rate site...it can say a lot about value.

 

Well if your site is fairly new wouldn't the bounce rates still be high?

 

Nope unrelated and I think much like load times, time on site is rapidly becoming a signal for the algo.

Exactly where I was headed with that. It is quite logical to gather that high bounce rates=site not relevant or totally sucks.

hope that helps,
Nigel

 

I consider this just a myth ...

 

A high bounce rate may not necessarily mean the site is irrelevant to their search query. There are plenty of one-page sites, and they would have a super high bounce rate, while the users (might) have found what there were looking for. There are plenty of large sites where just a one page visit is enough to give you the info you've been looking for. Say I am looking for currency exchange rates, just one page visit is enough to give me what i need. Say i want a 7 day weather forecast, again one page view is what i need. I want the latest soccer scores, again one page view is enough to give me what i need.

 

Here's a thought then.
Maybe the algo is clever enough to determine the nature of the niche the site is in - and what a 'healthy' bounce rate should be.

So for exchange rate sites - which will be highly dynamic - a high bounce rate is the norm for that niche.

Whereas for a niche in "how to build a garden deck" - a high bounce rate would be indiciative of a "bad" site that is not giving the people what they want.

Kind of like the difference between watching Burger King turnover hundreds of people an hour and a Michelin star restaurant turnover 6 people an hour - both are providing customers exactly what they want - one has a very high bounce rate, the other has a very low bounce rate....

 

Google don't use bounce rate as reported in google analytics, but...
If a user goes to your website and returns to the search results page to click on the other results google will take it into account. Just search this forum.... there has been a lot of discussion about it.

 

I highly doubt they will (ever) use it for SERPs, but more likely for AdSense or Adwords. There are just too many unknows. An accurate 'healthy' bounce rate is almost impossible to determine. Not all sites (probably a huge majority) use google analytics.

 

Yes, high bounce rate can affect your search engine ranking. High bounce rate means Google consider website as a spam.

 

The bounce rate has no effect on SERP because the Google SERPs ranking places great importance on links and ranking depends links. If you have more number of quality links, then you can get good ranks.