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Google Algorithm Update – Is Bounce Rate a Ranking Signal?

User Bounces in the Post-Panda World

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By · May 5, 2011 · 81 Comments
Google Algorithm Update – Is Bounce Rate a Ranking Signal?

Forget for a moment everything you think you know about Google and how they rank content. Put yourself in the role of a person who is tasked with ranking results. One result gets clicked often, but most of the time the user only stays on the page for a few seconds (if that), returns to the results page, and clicks on another result.

Meanwhile, another result on the same page gets clicked on a lot too, but when users click on that one, they stay on the page longer, and don’t even return to the results page to find another result to click on. Nor do they refine their query. Which page is most likely the one that has the better content for that particular search?

Should bounce rate be a ranking signal? Comment here.

Well, being a human, you have the luxury of looking at both pages and making that call. Now, pretend you’re not a human. You’re a computer algorithm tasked with ranking the world’s information for the majority of searchers. While you have over 200 signals that can help you determine which one should rank higher, wouldn’t this be one that could help?

This is not exactly bounce rate, but it’s related. In this case, it is the bounce in the direction of back to the SERP, and while there has been a lot of discussion and argument about whether Google uses actual bounce rate as a signal, it seems pretty likely that they are looking at this specific element of it.

SearchMetrics, after releasing data about the Panda winners and losers in the UK, said, “It seems that all the loser sites are sites with a high bounce rate and a less time on site ratio. Price comparison sites are nothing more than a search engine for products. If you click on a product you ‘bounce’ to the merchant. So if you come from Google to ciao.co.uk listing page, than you click on an interesting product with a good price and you leave the page. On Voucher sites it is the same. And on content farms like ehow you read the article and mostly bounce back to Google or you click Adsense.”

“And on the winners are more trusted sources where users browse and look for more information,” the firm added. “Where the time on site is high and the page impressions per visit are also high. Google’s ambition is to give the user the best search experience. That’s why they prefer pages with high trust, good content and sites that showed in the past that users liked them.”

WebmasterWorld Founder Brett Tabke wrote in a recent forum post, discussing what he calls the “Panda metric“, that “Highly successful, high referral, low bounce, quality, and historical pages have seen a solid boost with panda.”

In a recent video from Google’s Matt Cutts, on ranking in 2011, he talks about increasing site speed, and how this can keep users on your site longer (IE: not bouncing), you can increase your ROI. Speed is a ranking signal. We know that. Speed can reduce bounce rate. Even if Google doesn’t use bounce rate directly, there is a strong relationship here.

A reader (hat tip to Jordy) sent us this link from Matt McGee at SearchEngineLand, posted last June:

Bounce rate and rankings? Matt [Cutts] says Google Analytics is not used in the general ranking algorithm. “To the best of my knowledge, the rankings team does not use bounce rate in any way.” He tiptoed around this question a bit, choosing his words very carefully.

The part about tiptoeing is somewhat intriguing in and of itself, but it’s also important to note that this was nearly a year ago, and the Panda update was not announced until just this past February (and has even been tweaked since then).

We also picked the brain of SEO vet Jim Boykin. We asked Jim how important he thinks bounce rate is. He says, “I think that some aspects of bounce rate are very important in the post-panda world.”

“It’s important to note how Google defines Bounce Rate,” he adds. This is below:

“Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert. 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.”

He also points to how it is defined in Google Analytics:

“The percentage of single page visits resulting from this set of pages or page.”

“Personally, I don’t think that a single page visit is a bad thing. To me, it tells me the visitor found what they were looking for. Isn’t that what Google would want? If I were Google, I’d want a searcher to find the answer to their search on the exact page they clicked on in a search result…not 1 or 2 clicks in. If I were Google, I’d look more at ‘Who Bounces off that page, and returns to the same Google search, and clicks on someone else, and then never returns to your site,’ but I’m not Google, and that’s just my ‘if I were Google’ thoughts”.

Regardless, it can’t be a bad thing to strive to make every page of yours the best page of its type – the solution to the searcher’s problem. At its heart, that is really what the Panda update is about. Really, that’s what search ranking is about in general. Delivering the BEST result for the query – signals aside.

As far as links, while Boykin says it’s “kind of” fair to say that making sure your links point to quality pages can have a major impact on how Google ranks your site post-Panda, he says, “The final solution should be to remove or fix the low quality pages, and thus, all your links would point to ‘quality pages’.”

Again, this should improve bounce rate.

“I think most agree that there’s a ‘Page Score’ or a ‘set of pages score,’ and when that has a bad score, it affects those pages, and somehow ripples up the site,” Boykin adds. “It could quite well be that if you have a page that links out to 100 internal pages, and if 80 of those pages are ‘low quality’ than it just might affect that page as well. A lot of this is hard to prove, but there are some smoking guns that can point in this direction.”

“Bounce rate is important, and yes, many sites that got hit did have a high bounce rate, but comparing this to sites/pages that weren’t hit doesn’t exactly show any ‘ah ha’ moments of ‘hey, if your bounce rate is over 75%, then you got Panda pooped on,’ because the bounce rate Google shows the public is missing many key metrics that they know, but don’t share with us.”

I think the best advice you can follow in relation to all of this is to simply find ways to keep people from leaving your site, before they complete the task you want them to complete. That means providing content they want.

Is bounce rate important in the post-Panda world? Tell us what you think.

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There are 81 Comments. Add Yours.

  1. We have two types of visitor to our website.
    Visitor a: Has a long session time and long page duration reading information

    Visitor b: Is looking for information fast such as contact details or an answer. In this instance a user may simple go to a page form google search results go to our page and be referred to a new external page that belongs to a client. This produces a bounce.

  2. crispy_cadaques
    Reply

    It’s probably RETURN rate rather than BOUNCE rate that is being taken into account. In fact, more accurately, it’s “SUBSEQUENT CLICK” rate: how many users quickly leave the first web site visited to return to a SERP and click on another listing for the same, or related, search term.

  3. I wonder if the term “bounce rate” is confusing the issue…

    Chris introduced his article by describing two very different visitor behaviors associated with a single Google search query. In the first case, a visitor clicks on a result and stays on the landing page a few seconds (if that), returns to the SERP and makes an alternate selection. In the second case, a visitor clicks on a different result and never returns to the SERP. Case 1 has an obviously high bounce rate. Case 2 may or may not, we can’t know unless we have access to the site’s log or Google Analytics report.

    What we do know is that in case 1 Google’s log will show a 2 second or less absence from the SERP and then another exit shortly thereafter from the same SERP. In case 2 we see an exit and no return. So while I wholeheartedly agree that it is entirely possible to satisfy a query in a single page visit, I doubt that can be done in under two seconds. So if Google wants to penalize “teflon” sites because they are poorly designed, irrelevant, slow responding or whatever, I have to say I am OK with that. I think if the visitor found what s/he wanted, s/he’d stay more than 2 seconds and then maybe stick around or go back and refine the query or start over again.

    Thanks for a fun and though provoking discussion Chris!

    • Jack
      Reply

      ok..

      When I do search for something, I personally like to open as many relevant links that i find, from those i start puting a bunch of them in my favorites and close the site. later from my favorites i go to the sites and spend time on them.. but most of my initial search is random and fast, there might be alot of amazing sites that i didnt find helpful, so i closed the page fast, but also the ones i liked, i save and close at the same rate…

      so how am i helping with the bounce rate?? I am not..

  4. What bothers me the most is that something called Google is extrapolating things it can’t understand, on such a HUGE scale of reality it can’t phantom, called the human psyche, facing the full blast of human-based reality. As Humans, we’re used to make split-second decisions about thousands of things every second or minute just to cross the street, do window shopping, instinctively respond to colors, shapes and look ahead on future shopping, outlook shopping for family or friends and alike that evolved over centuries of habit-forming behaviours that have proven themselves to better serve our purpose and interests. NOW, Google comes along, as a real reality-crawling device TELLING US what we are doing when we’re bouncing or not and from websites, determining their impact on REALITY it can’t figure out with any base of certainty, let alone reality. If my investment consultant were to invest my hard-earned cash in this stupid way of reading what companies & the stock-market is doing, I’d tell him to go fetch a kite and get out of my business. WHY, ohhh why should we tolerate having such an idiot choose what we CAN or CAN’T do, see, look at -at what ever pace or speed we feel like, based on its need to over-over-simplify complex human choices and behaviours it can’t obviously deal with? The more I read into Google (et al) eternal and on-going search for algo-deducing math cutting-up OUR HUMAN reality, the more I feel diminished, NOT HELPED by Google attempts to “Better Serve my Needs”. Please Google, get out of my hair and that market and transcend this approach of minimizing all of the world’s reality to fit your mindset and world-view of having to control every outcome of our interest in anything, if not in all things. I sure hope that other search-engines will invent other ways of presenting content, based on META-ALGO approaches where we’re left to CHOOSE what we want to see based on what we want to see, be it crap according to Google (et al.) Random search results could even do better than algo-results for that matter… So, help humans stay humans without second-guessing why we breathe, and at what rate, on the SERPs you’re showing us… for you’ll never get it significantly right! IMHO – By the way, I’ve been doing SEO since 1998 and I find it ridiculous the ways Google is going about developing itself by counting the number of atoms crushed by each click to estimate the value of our individual need or interest… and serve us its feedback-derived cold plate of sub-human reasoning it can muster-up about the corporate, industrial or private world visions of WE THE HUMANS, that we’d have to blindly follow into eternal dumbness… WoW… Where’s the exit-strategy to this blinding algo madness? Pierre

    • “…counting the number of atoms crushed by each click to estimate the value of our individual need or interest” you say. This reminds me of so many mind-trips going back to childhood or later if you ever got involved with LSD that would make you SEE stuff way down there, on a pin’s head, that could explain everything about everything. I’d tend to agree that human bounce rates done by billions of people on billion of websites can’t be nicely fitted into a single-file of nicely looking and controled intentions, unless you (Google) starts believing in its own spin that it can manage the world’s intention by just mesuring a binary mode of response… If “To bounce or not to bounce IS THE QUESTION…”… What’s the aswer? :-) Treating and serving Humans as furniture or appliances might sound funny but it is not.

  5. Bounce rate can only be a factor if time is also a factor. I have some long pages were bounce rate is high (77%) but people spend over 6 minute on the page, on average which suggests to me that they are engaged. You don’t spend 6 minutes looking at a page if you are not interested in the content.

    The problem with bounce rate and pageviews is that it implies that a webpage should never provide a new reader with the information that they want. I am sure news sites have higher pageviews that information pages, but that does not mean that they provide the reader with a better experience, it probably just means they are good at writing catching headlines that people click only to find a few lines of nonsense.

  6. David Quaglieri
    Reply

    There are far too many factors to accurately determine content value based on user behaviours. Personally, I think Google’s +1 will improve ‘content value’ algorythms as long as the Internet community uses +1 and adequate consideration to ‘+1 spamming’

  7. Hi I appreciate the important information. Is there a way to find out if you have a high bounce rate?

  8. If businesses are doing a great job with their content, bouncing may be a natural action taken by the visitor. Think about your use of Wikipedia – a site that Google loves. Most of us search for a topic, find the Wikipedia page, read the topic, and bounce. That’s not because Wikipedia did a bad job… it’s because they did a great job.

  10. I believe it should be used, but I seem to be in the minority. My site has lots of interesting content, most of my competetors do not. Good content keeps users on the page longer.

    Also, if a page is irrelevant to the search term, it should be ranked lower and time spent on the page is a fair and relevant way to determine if the page is relevant to the search phrase or words.

  11. There is no doubt in my mind as to the importance of bounce rates because web content do need to be relevant, interesting and current. It is for this reason that I always maintain that good SEO is great practice. Spammy sites with little or nothing relevant, and only aimed at getting you to sign-up for some over-priced offer will deservedly suffer from a high bounce rate.

  12. If done correctly I think bounce rates would definitely help put the right sites towards the top. What is correctly, well I don’t claim to have that answer.

    I can’t help but think though that between analytics and tracking cookies they could paint a clear picture of user behaviour. Who goes to a site and stays as compared to a user who goes to a site then returns to the SERP’s for another result.

    Having said that, I could search for something, land on a site then revisit the SERP’s to find another site and have them both open at once for some comparison shopping, this and many other scenarios would have to be covered before bounce rates could be given any significant weight!

  13. To measure bounce rate one requires the GA so how does it measure bounce rate in the absence of this tool. Sure any algo metric should be applied across the board to have sense of value so to me it suggest that is not a factor. Further exting a page from a point of entry is no indication that it has not met its value. I often leave a page from a point of entry because I may have chosen to print the document, save the url via bookmarking or emailing or cut and paste the text so t is aailable offline. This often happens when I’m researching a topic and need to get as much info as possible. As indicated by the many contributors it is impossible to determine my intent or my level of satifaction. The bottom line is that a bounce rate can represent several complex factors which NO algo can measure. No piece of code can determine the user’s intent at the time the search was conducted and any attempt to judge search quality using such metrics is nothing short of ludricous. Google may be well advised to stick to the factors that it understands and can be measured.

  14. It baffles me how any website owner could possibly believe that having a high bounce rate is okay. Particularly, if after checking their analytics package, the bounces are generated from any of the search engines.

    This is where website usability is needed to work hand-in-hand with SEO; it’s okay getting to the top of the search engines, but if your website’s bounce rate is unnaturally high, then surely this is a pointer for the search engines to rate your site negatively.

  15. Bounce rate cannot be used in the algo, using the current Google definition of the term, for all the reasons mentioned above and more.

    What Google can measure is bounceback as an indicator of user satisfaction. It would be very easy to update a counter for every time a user returned to the SERPS from a page within a given time period.
    Quite obviously the results did not satisfy the user which logically means that the SERPS quality was not good enough.

  16. There are many websites that pride themselves in providing specific information quickly. As an example say you are looking for a phone number of a restaurant from PC. My website lists over 4,000 Twin Cities Restaurants so I get lots of quick searches. You come in through one of a thousand pages find your number and you’re gone! Should my site be penalized? How about Google? Often they use my listings and will put the phone number right into the listing so they never need to go to my page. However, it will look like they did not get what they wanted and just left without even making a selection. So should all these SERPs be penalized?

  17. cyberbullying hurts alot of people. why cant they just it to their faces instead of online? bc then people whould probably believe them :)

  18. Bob
    Reply

    No, it shouldn’t be a ranking signal and that’s one of the reasons Google should be broken up or prevented from gathering such data which can devastate a business. It is silly to use such a noisy metric to rank sites. Analytics should be a different company by itself or data not used to affect site ranking in any way.

  19. Harold G.
    Reply

    Bounce Rate does not, and will not, ever be used as a ranking factor for the simple reason that it is not demonstrative of a negative, or irrelevant visit. A simple example that qualifies the aforementioned is when a visitor hits your home page and sees enough relevant content and imagery to be compelled to call the big, shiny 1-800 number at the top of the site for more information. The visitor got enough relevant information right from the home page thanks to your very focused, well-designed and, again, relevant layout. This happens all the time. Hence, the the number of page views isn’t what’s important; it is the relevance of your content.

  20. What figures of bounce rate are deemed good or bad (as per google analytics)?

    I would place a picture of a girl with big tits on homepage to keep customers for a couple of seconds longer.

  21. The lesson is that you need an interesting informative website relevant to the keyword search or the viewer will leave your website and find the next one on the search page. The most popular websites where viewers spend hours are social media and video websites: Facebook, Twitter, Youtube. Lots of interesting content and interaction between the content providers and their viewers. Thus, most businesses should shift their online strategies to include social media and video in their websites to get viewers aka potential customers.

  22. When it come to ranking- Beef up the quality on your site and let the rest take care of itself. Bounce rate should only figure in if that page was visited by a real person from Google so they could see what`s really there.

  23. It would make good sense for bounce rate to be part of SE’s ranking algorithm as it is based on the users good or bad initial experiance on the page or site. Even if it is not a factor now it’s my guess that it very well may be it the future.

    • Harold G.
      Reply

      Let me try this again:

      Bounce Rate DOES NOT, and WILL NOT, ever be used as a ranking factor for the simple reason that it is not demonstrative of a negative, or irrelevant visit. A simple example that qualifies the aforementioned is when a visitor hits your home page and sees enough relevant content and imagery to be compelled to call the big, shiny 1-800 number at the top of the site for more information. The visitor got enough relevant information right from the home page thanks to your very focused, well-designed and, again, relevant layout. This happens all the time. Hence, the the number of page views isn’t what’s important; it is the relevance of your content.

  24. I think there is definetely some confusion of what exactly what “bounce rate” is. It’s definition is somewhat vauge as well
    and perhaps it would help if google updated its analytics terms.

    For instance – What is the difference between someone landing on a home page and immediately leaving (within 3-5 sec) and someone staying on and reading some content and leaving after say 45 secs?

    We have 2 bounces clearly by googles call but visitor #2 may have benefitted from that 45 sec visit and perhaps learned something.

    • I think you are touching on how Google COULD use analytics somehat effectively, but it is definitely not with the bounce rate. We can see how bounce rate can be manipulated, how people can get good info off a bounce page etc. What not many people have talked about which the reader above comments on, is time spent on site, perhaps number of page views, but also the raw visitoror numbers. If a decent number visitors show up and they are spending an average of say 5 minutes on the site, what could tell Google a site was more popular and had interesting information on it? How long someone spends there. Of course that is kind of meaningless if you only get 10 people. But if you have thousands a people a month spending longer than average on the site, that definitely adds up to a site that shows good value to readers, and I believe they would use these numbers before trying to take bounce rate into account.
      My site is an example, where it shows sober living houses across the country. Alot of managers want to check their own sites out in the standings and can do that in a matter of less than a minute thus giving a high bounce rate. But for the people looking for houses they stay a while and have numerous page views, showing the site is doing its job for the “searchers”. Find Sober Livings or related Halfway Houses easily and fast.

  25. Bounce rate, like many metrics can very easily be manipulated by the site owner. A bounce is calculated when there is only one pageview in the visit. HOWEVER, a site owner can programmatically generate a second pageview. So even though a visitor might only see one page, Google Analytics would register 2 pages and thus NO bounce

  26. Bounce rate? who would have thought? I wonder how that is doing for all the people who use programs like senuke to drop their signature everywhere? these incoming visitors are likely to be curious if anything and not targeted visitors. Seems like some of the automated seo methods may be taking a big hit.

  27. This is really very interesting, many thanks for discussing it. Remember to also stop by our website. We’re firm that offers Seo services, Web Page Design, Customized Software package Development and IT innovations in Philadelphia.

  28. I do not agree this should be used in the algorithm, like you have mentioned in this article, the human should be the one to make this decision!

    Also for people who do get a high bouncerate, how are they supposed to improve on this and refine their website to contain the content that people want to see?

    Another move by google that shows their arrogance

  29. Great news, its good for a common user. Now i hope better search result will come out.

  30. I don’t think that bounce rate affects on ranking . If I don’t use Google analytics , Google can’t be able to calculate my bounce rate. So.. how will the bounce rate affect my ranking? and I am agreed with @Joe Dundas & @Jack Fisher. What they described is logically true.

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