Bounces (one-page visitors)

[Spider]

"Taking bounce rate into account in their algorithm" = "Combining them with other metrics"

Yes?

[vangogh]

If you can prove that the left side of your equation is happening I'll answer the question.

What I'm saying is even if we assume the left side of your equation is true, it doesn't mean it's anything important to focus on. Google has stated they use more than 200 ranking factors. That was several years ago. More likely they use many more ranking factors. The thing is using one doesn't mean it plays any significant part or even applies to most searches.

There's a danger in focusing on individual ranking factors like this in that you become myopic in your seo. You start chasing after something that might have very limited benefits at best thinking it might be the key to the magic formula. Is Google using bounce rate as a ranking factor? Possibly. I think there are more reasons why they wouldn't use it than why they would use it, but it's certainly possible they are. Again though, even if they are it's unlikely to play any significant role.

There are much more important things to pay attention to than bounce rates. Where search engines are concerned it's unlikely you'd notice a difference in ranking or traffic due to a change in bounce rate. Where real people are concerned bounce rates are a useless metric when talked about in isolation.

[AaronConway]

Want to reduce your bounce rate? Be sure you give them someplace to go. Last fall, when I took over admin of an e-commerce site they didn't have any "related products" listed on the product pages and their bounce rate was around 70-75%. I immediately started working on those related products and the bounce rate immediately started dropping. It's now at 45%.

Aaron

[vangogh]

Definitely one way you can try to improve bounce rates.

Again though I'll say bounce rate alone isn't that meaningful. Someone who lands on a page of your site, spends a few minutes on that page, and finds everything they need before leaving will have a bounce rate of 100%. Someone who lands on a page, doesn't find what they want and clicks around to several other pages and not finding anything of interest before leaving has a bounce rate of 0%. Your site performed rather well for that first person who is more likely to come back than the second person.

You need to consider bounce rate with other metrics before really knowing whether or not there's a problem or how to fix it. A high bounce rate isn't automatically bad and a low bounce rate isn't automatically good.

[tylerhutchinson]

Bounce rate is just another metric to look at. As long as people are coming to your site and learning about your venture that should be good enough. No company has 100% sales on every site hit. I would worry about getting traffic to the site and let the bounce rate just be a mathematical statistic. Think about it a 50% bounce rate on 200 hits per day is 100 people going deeper in your site. But a 50% bounce rate on 10,000 hits per day is still 5,000 potential people going further into your site for business.

To get it lower I think the advice you put is the best way, but I would focus your time and energy on driving traffic to the site instead of fixing bounce rate. Just my opinion.

[vangogh]

I think you can focus on improving bounce rates. To me it's more that they can't be looked at in isolation. No metric really can. You simply can't tell much by looking at bounce rate alone.

[greenoak]

i dont worry about bounce rates.... my front page shows so much that if someone didnt look farther it would be obvious they wouldnt be a likely customer anyway..
like me and probably lots of folks, they know in a second if the site is for them....i dont sell on line tho....

[uwwandrew]

Consider the site/demographic/service when evaluating bounce rate. If you are selling soap a high bounce rate is worse than a law firm who's visitors just want the fax number on the home page.

[vangogh]

Another good example for why bounce rate alone tells you little. It's one metric that needs to be looked at in combination with other metrics before it tells you anything meaningful.

[LLP707]

I agree with Vangogh here bounce rate metrics should be taken with a grain of salt. I think your time would be better spent trying to increase traffic. Howver if you are really worried and want to run some tests you could set up two different layouts on a different area of your site with similar bounce rates and content to compare the change in bounce rate. This will let you determine which layout is more effective. However as mentioned earlier do not get overly worried about the metric.