What if a site is not using Analytics? Is Google still counting bounce ?

Bouce rate has been a factor for a while now and I believe it will remain a factor for a long time.

It’s a way for Search Engines to check whether the sites that they are ranking on their SERPs are relevant to what the users are searching for. If a site has very high bounce rate, it’s a good indicator that it’s not what the users are searching for and search engines will remove them from ranking sooner or later.

It probably is a factor but its one of the many factors that determine if your content is good or not.  We just have to make sure that our content is good and that the title and description is spot on.  Which is what we ought to be doing anyway.

I think it’s been pretty obvious that bounce rate can have an impact on rankings, especially if you are going through a Google search and searching over and over with similar keywords.

What I’d like to focus on is about Social Media… Digg, Reddit, SU, Del.icio.us, Mixx, Propeller and other send tons of traffic to the top sites in the world, like CNN / FOX / TechCrunch / YouTube / etc., yet those sites rank higher and higher every day and are positively affected by "high amounts of traffic with very very very high bounce rates". Imagine if you are FlickR – it should tank like hell… People look at the picture 5 seconds and then they are gone.

So, for me, if higher bounce rates would have an impact, and if we would apply a direct correlation, any site "hit" by social websites would tank as we know most of those visitors have a pretty high bounce rate as they usually read an article and then come back to the social site in question.

So this whole theory is more of a joke than anything.

On another side, you could easily figure that Google knows what is the average time people look at articles on each of the social sites (Digg, etc.) and then give some sort of correlation, but then text article, video article, image articles would have different numbers.

All in all, what is your opinion regarding getting huge loads of traffic with those sites? I have been doing it for several months and never ever saw any ranking issues (beside positive impacts) on more than 50 sites – so I tend to say this is just speculation, especially regarding the "bounce rate %" taken alone into consideration.

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I tend to agree that bounce rates are already a factor and will become more important in the future as the engines move to a somewhat more personalized model for searches.

Yes, if you ask me bounce rate always has been a ranking factor, i have personally exprienced but never had the courage to believe it, but it seems my fears are coming true, i have seen it pretty happening all over my niches…when visitors stay on your site the serps for that particular keyword seems to get some kind of kick….bounce rate is directly dependent on the content quality which means when someone says content is king….that factor seems to be reinforced with the bounce factor being considered as to keep visitors on your page for long and keep hitting around one needs to have quality content and nothing else…seems to be true

As long as Google can tell the difference.

There are plenty of legitimate business models out there who’s business is to bring people into their site and get them to travel to another site, ie:  directories, ad links, etc - 

Closing the browser window on your website is one thing – moving from a page on your website to another website is an entirely different matrix and should not be used in a ‘ranking’ algorithm.

On a blog many people find the site with a search for specific information.  Typically they read the article they found, then move on to the next search result.  Usually people are looking specifically for the info they land on.  They don’t usually start reading all sorts of other posts on the site.  Penalizing for this sort of traffic does not make sense.

So I don’t get it.

The Google and Overall visits to the site in your example dip as the bounce rate decreases?

Surely this is proving the opposite to the theory being expoused.

I think bounce rate does play an important role, but it’s also not a matter of high bounce rate = poor quality page, depending on the industry. After all if a user is going to a deep page, they may find exactly what they are looking for and move on. As for tracking, it would be possible for Google to track the back button clicks, returning to their own results, wouldn’t it? Regardless of whether the site has G analytics or not?