The Impact of Bounce Rate on Google?

[liquidlunch]

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I've read a few sites which proclaim that the bounce rate does affect the position Google will place a site at.

Does anyone pay any attention to their bounce rate and have any experience of it affecting their position in Google?

[pedigreechump6]

Oh LL, you've gone and opened up a whole can of worms with this one. If I remember similar post on other forums nobody has a straight answer, one or more people may point towards a couple of fairly interesting experiments done (I will try and dig these up too) and a video by Matt Cutts, but at the end of the day you have to put yourself in Google's shoes and ask whether you'd include bounce rate in the algorithm.

I'd say for most sites it probably has less than one a percent impact on the rankings but in my honest belief there is probably a red flag limit beyond which Google will spank your site, probably not algorithmically but by way of a manual review. If they can stop people from gaming the system, bounce rate might one day be more important though.

And for those of you who ask how they get a bounce rate if a site does not have Google analytics on it, they could use toolbar data or as rough estimate the time it takes for someone to click back to Google after first clicking on a search result.

[pedigreechump6]

So here was an experiment conducted:

Google bounce factor research data is in

and I was wrong, it was a comment on Sphinn not a video from Matt:

Bounce Rate SEO Fallacies

in which he says:

Without reading the article, I’ll just say that bounce rates would be not only spammable but noisy. A search industry person recently sent me some questions about how bounce rate is done at Google and I was like "Dude, I have no idea about any things like bounce rate. Why don’t you talk to this nice Google Analytics evangelist who knows about things like bounce rate?" I just don’t even run into people talking about this in my day-to-day life.

So make your own mind up on that one! I don't trust everything Matt says but I'm smart enough to know that Google don't give away a leading analytics package for free without getting something from it. I don't even use Google Analytics anymore.

[Barry]

I dont think youd have to have analytics's installed forgoogle to get basic bounce rates.

They count and monitor whats clicked on in the serps through javascript and even sometimes through appending their tracking to the serps destination url and can easily work out when someone is searching for the same phrase minutes later or when they press the back button and search again or choose another listing.

I think they do gather this data and use it to some extent.

Ta

Baz

[aotagain]

LL.. If all these various answers to questions are going to be any use to you at all, without causing your head to explode, I suggest you make a huge list of all your questions and then rank the importance of each when you get the answers. Otherwise you'll be running around your sites like the proverbial headless chicken.

Perhaps include a rating for relevance to your own sites or types of site, for each question.
I'd assume the same 'error' level in all the answers.
Plus try to detach yourself from the minute details of SEO debate and concentrate on the priorities for each site.

So you've got a list starting with:

Unique content is extremely important for high ranking
all the way through to:
Page sculpting using nofollow helps / doesn't help ranking
and Google spies on everyone and doesn't tell you ;-)