SEO, Search Engine Ranking, Bounce Rate and Google

Posted • December 11, 2008 • 2 Comments

Has Google been confirmed as using bounce rate as a search engine ranking factor?

According to the SEO Black Hat website and the post Confirmed: Bounce Rate is A Search Engine Ranking Factor:

The top SEOs now have to take bounce rate into account when designing and/or refining a site. Non-believers just keep doing what you’re doing and hope it works tomorrow.

I think they make a very good case for their stance.

You decide for yourself.

SEO continues to evolve. Need more evidence that Google uses bounce rate to test their SERPs?

Here’s are some screenshots from one site with Google Analytics. (courtesy of SEO Black Hat)

The first shows overall traffic:

the 2nd shows Google traffic:

and the 3rd shows Bounce rates:

This is exactly the pattern you would expect from a program designed to flush out terms with higher bounce rates and test them across other sties. Moreover, this isn’t the first time I’ve recognized this pattern, it happens every 2-3 months on average.

Unsurprisingly, the word “bounce” does not even appear once in Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. Too bad I didn’t print it our first, because then I could at least use it to wipe my ass.

However, Google does give some clues in their analytics support page, Google notes:

Bounce Rate: 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.

In this instance, you can substitute “ad copy” with “SERP preview” for organic results. So for the site in the above example, I just have to taylor each result for the 193,018 keywords and phrases that were used in the past month, hope that some of them repeat themselves, and anticipate every permutation that Google’s gonna throw at me next month.

Then Jordan McCollum in his post Linky Goodness:

SEO Blackhat says that they’ve Confirmed that Bounce Rate is A Search Engine Ranking Factor. Well, from their graphs, I see that their overall traffic, Google traffic and bounce rate all declined at the same time. But if I remember my Google Analytics correctly, bounce rate going down actually means that fewer people are leaving your site after viewing just one page, so your site is stickier. So Google rewards sites that people leave quickly with higher rankings and thus more traffic? I’m not convinced. Correlation still isn’t causation—couldn’t it be that Google traffic dropped off (for whatever reason) and then a higher proportion of visitors are the loyal visitors who weren’t bouncing anyway?

Marketing Pilgrim posted some questions about the bounce rate proposition from today’s earlier post:

Well, from their graphs, I see that their overall traffic, Google traffic and bounce rate all declined at the same time. But if I remember my Google Analytics correctly, bounce rate going down actually means that fewer people are leaving your site after viewing just one page, so your site is stickier. So Google rewards sites that people leave quickly with higher rankings and thus more traffic?

SEO Black Hat Replies:

No. You are a little confused. Google leaves in tact the traffic that doesn’t bounce and takes away the traffic that does to test it across similar sites. It does not reward sites that make people leave, it does just the opposite (at least during these test periods).

Note the date ranges on each.

Note the % New Visitors on both: A virtual tie (83% vs 80%). But if you look at the bounce rate from google traffic, you will see they lowered the overall bounce rate during the test period from 63% to 41% – which is statistically very significant.

I plan on including bounce rate in my metric considerations for my search engine optimization. How about you?

Late,

Gary Pool

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