Bounce rates are being discussed regularly by SEOs
Apparently SEOs have been having very heated discussions about the concept of “bounce rates” on SEO. Myself, I figured a high bounce rate is meaningless. Consider blogs. Most of the traffic to a blog arrives from a search engine and lands on a single view post. They find exactly what they’re looking for and tend to bounce! It doesn’t matter what the subject matter is or how good your content is. People are using Google to find info. Much of the info they find is easily consumed.
Having a high bounce rate can’t be an important sign of quality in most cases. However, that hasn’t stopped people from arguing about it. Typical of most SEO arguments you’ll read online, there’s an awful lot of supposition and very little in the way of definitive proof.
This particular argument seems to be permanently ended when Matt Cutts comes in and lays it out.
Matt Cutts lays down the law on bounce rates
“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.”
He didn’t even have to read the crap article to know it was bullshit. Hell, neither did I. In any event, the time to consider the “bounce rate” as a be all and end all of search engine rankings has lived a short and miserable life. Lots of high quality websites have high bounce rates and I’m sure there are plenty of people with low quality websites that have low bounce rates. The key is the type of visitor and the type of content. If matched perfectly, MANY will bounce. That’s the nature of modern search engine traffic.
Bounce rate shouldn’t be, and isn’t, a part of the Google search rankings and that comes straight from the horse’s mouth.