Bounce rate metric outweighs most if not all - Google
 

Trust me on this

high pr backlinks + low bounce + social sharing = golden.

I'll second that

Same here,after i fixed bounce rate on my main site i am no longer penalized,before that was 10 time penalized.

so are you recommending blocking entire countries where you have high bounce rates? or improving the site based on incoming search terms?

In shortly,yes.

I concur doctor.

pretty much why Google loves tubes.

I have low social sharing... High bounce... and low PR backlinks... I still outrank the competition...

I think Google is drunk.

I like my bounce in the single digit range.

Maybe a dumb question but how does blocking entire countries lower your bounce rate?
Seems to me like it would raise it.

In theory, time spent on page should be weighted more heavily than bounce rate because if someone searches for X, clicks on page Y, and finds whatever it was he wanted to find, the need go to another page within the site should be less than the need to stay on page y.

What is the best way to block high-bounce countries, .htaccess?

I thought that would increase the bounce rate in seconds as they are clicking serps and then right back to google if they can't access your site.

Bounce rate attack on your competition!

dirty dirty dirty

That's actually an awesome idea.

At the end of the day, backlinks still trump all with G.

Little has changed. I can still move my pages through link development.

So what is the actual weight and which combination works the best?

low bounce - high average time on page
many low PR backlinks vs few high PR backlinks

Google prefers sites that surfers actually enjoy, news at 11!

Seriously though, several of my favorite posters in this thread. Some of the smart guys that actually still post. :2 cents:

haha.. "i did X and 9 months later..."

Bounce rates are far from a major factor. For example, many TGPs still dominate some competitive search results. The major factors for google haven't changed much since 1998 - backlinks, anchor text, page titles, headings, text in body, site structure/link structure etc. All that has changed for the most part is how the value of links are calculated as well as better means at detecting devaluing spam links.

In 9 months, most of the adult internet changes from a search engines perspective as ALL of the links and value of links back to your sites are constantly changing and everything around your site is constantly in flux. Hardly scientific to look at an ocean and say "i sneezed and 6 months later a dead fish washed up on the beach, so therefore...."

It seems that almost everyone in this industry can't seem to understand that your site doesn't exist in a vacuum. Its part of the general matrix of adult sites, all are interconnected and interlinked and as new sites come and go, links come and go etc etc etc... all sites are affected and move up and down. Your site is going to move no matter what you do, unless you have enough good backlinks to hold it above the normal turmoil.

don't agree with this. most have been wiped and increasingly so with every panda update.

I don't really pay attention to them much anymore. So i'll concede thats the case because i'm too lazy to start looking :). The specific example i was thinking of when i was typing was 3pic being number 1 for "teen sex" for many years as well as some of the other older tgps holding similar phrases for many years. The whole "Bounce rate" myth isn't new and never did impact search results. Though it might be one of countless signals that are factored into ranking, its not important and its really only known by those using analytics.

Anyway, no matter what particular factors people may think are important... people seem to forget that first and foremost, backlinks matter. Thats how Pagerank works, thats how the value/trust/authority of a page is determined, thats why the people that are ranking for the top phrases in porn are number 1 and thats the single largest reason everyones sites move around, up and down... because all sites are connected and the behavior/ranking of each has an impact (negligible or not) on the ranking of others.

Adult domains are probably about 1.5% or so of all registered domains, a significant % of them are parked and a significant % are not online. Most sites are small... just a few pages vs mainstream where sites might have 100s of thousands or millions of pages. In the context of the internet as a whole, the adult internet/adult pages are most likely much less than .1% of all pages online. So it cannot be overstated, the degree to which they are connected and the degree to which, each impacts the other.

... (edit) - The point being that a few sites can be hit very hard and those effects trickle out and effect others negatively who have changed nothing and are doing everything right through the loss of those inbound links ... or competition drops out and yours rises just because its there, next in line etc etc .. not necessarily because one is doing something right or wrong or different.

yes backlinks are the basis and always will be, but panda has been laid on top and unless you satisfy its factors all the backlinks in the world won't do much any more.

what a stupid statement - most if not all ?

you want backlinks backlinks and more fucking backlinks

I would say that depends on the backlinks/quality of the backlinks. :)

PR?

Tool Bar PR is not "PageRank"

One is calculated a few times a year for mere amusement and is a very poor and inaccurate reflection of the reality behind a sites linking at any given moment in time... one is calculated in real time and is still the primary metric of Google to rank pages just as all major search engines rely on a similar formula as their primary metric.

back links > content > bounce rate > time on site

I don't know how anybody hasn't brought this up, but RELAVANCY? Backlinks are still important, but not just quality... Also they should be relevant.0 what is a quality link to site A might not be for site B.

Another trick to help you bounce rate is always open outgoing links in a new window :)

Obvious but something I never even considered.

Thanks Jay, awaiting Paul Markham to fill us in on how to get a bounce rate of 0 though.

It has always been for amusement, nothing more. Toolbar PR is meaningless as the true PageRank of any given page on the internet is changing every second of the day and the toolbar has only historically been updated once ever 3-4 months or so.

And YOU mentioned toolbar PR which is why i was addressing your reply ;)

When you say a site is "PRx" you are talking about the Toolbar PR. Toolbar PR virtually zero connection to Google ranking pages other than being a rough indicator of total/quality of inbound links to a given page which is only updated once every 3-4 months (or less).

I don't get this bounce rate crap! how can this be relevant? is this not taking shit back like 6 or 7 years when multi tab browsing was not the norm?

I mean these days people are using TABS. They will leave open a TAB for maybe hours and hours without even looking at the site for one second!


bounce rate would make sense if it was 2004 and everybody is using IE

This thread is weird. People disagreeing about SEO techniques.

QTF??!!111oneoneone

Does anybody have a list of countries i want to block?

Everything except usa,canada,au,ch,de,nl,uk and fr :1orglaugh

Turkey has a pretty low bounce rate BTW...

Unless you incur a linking penalty.

Actually,best would be to have counter which will show bounce rate per country.Anyone knows for such counter ?

We all like that lol. I doubt even porn.com is that low

I do this for all links except sponsor links which usually are the dominating outlinks on my blogs. Have you had any experience on how opening sponsor paysites in a new window will perform as to opening in the same window? I have always felt that if I link to a sponsor It should not be a _blank link. Maybe I should reconsider?

Social media back links are also extremely beneficial to sites as a whole and not necessarily just what they're linking to on your site.

I like to use all _blanks. I've never split tested, but overall sales have increased since I started doing it. Here's a good plugin. Kind of annoying when editing, but works fine.

http://www.wp1stop.com/make-all-link...gin-developer/

I have a site with 16% bounce rate i should be making $$ right?

I don't know this for a fact, but as long as your site is open, nobody has "bounced" yet. It seems like simple logic.

I know there was some people doing some blackhat stuff, like opening a 1 pixel popunder for a while, but google got hip to then an penalized.

:)

Yeah its amazing aint it.

Not sure what the contradiction is...

Hahahaha :thumbsup

That's why you do your link development in a smart manner. It's still the cornerstone of SEO. While the bounce is a big, if newer player to the algo, you can still move your serps all days long with decent relevant backlinks.

Speaking of, since there are some smart people in this thread (it seems) - I'm on linkspun as user 'xxxjay' - hit me up on ICQ 62835707 if you want to trade...I will prioritize you over the 100's of so-so requests I get every few days.

IMHO it's stupid idea to block countries for bounce rate purposes.

If chinese guy clicks on your link through google, and get's "404 error" or smth similar, he will instantly click "back", and google will detect it as 1 second bounce rate.. IMHO it will harm your bounce rate and not help

When you block them at your firewall, they never get to a 404

Wouldn't Google be smart enough to take geographic bounce rate into consideration anyways?

If you have a 90% bounce rate from China and a 30% from the US, I would think they would factor that in rather than just averaging the whole thing out to 60%.

Per my contact at Google, geographic bounce is indeed a factor.

I'm sure you already know this... But just in case, and for others who may not be aware of it, try avoiding reciprocal link trades as much as possible. Do a-b-c(-d-e-f etc) trading whenever possible. Even more effective if you can do a-b c-d etc.