Is bounce rate the future of SEO?
 

Or are we already there?

By bounce rate I mean how long a visitor stays on your page after clicking your link in the SERPS.
If he stays for a long time, browses a few pages, then the SERPS will assume that you have some useful information there on the topic and adjust your ranking accordingly.
If he clicks the back button right away or clicks an off site link right away then maybe google decides the relevant info is contained in that off site link and not on your page?

I've noticed good productivity helps in the search engines on my own sites

I think it is already here.

Not always for the best either since sites with creative redirects tend to have a low bounce rate.

So what's a good number?

there have been some tests and experiments on the seo sites pointing either way - as usual the only way to know for sure is to do your own tests -

How the hell can google know how long the surfer stays on your pages? (unless you're using google analytics)

maybe they can see how quick you come back to the search results to click another link?

do tell more info please :)

I started a thread with a question, what makes you think I have any answers?

They've had access to this info for a long time from what I've heard....I'm not sure how, I'm not a programmer.

exactly, or if you do at all.

which may mean that you found what you wanted.

They don't, but they know how quickly he either comes back or loads google again.

I was looking for an opinion, really.

a good bounce rate is under 40% and they only have the info if you have analytics on your site. (it is the number of people who leave your site in under x seconds)

Yeah, that's a good bounce rate.

That's the only thing i can thnk of. And it's very unreliable.

Usign google analytics on your site is pretty dumb.

Good stats, but it lets google spy the hell out of you sites/network.

google tools owns everything...

Google has different ways of determining stats such as bounce rate. The google toolbar is certainly one way. Another is putting cookies in surfers' browsers. Who knows what else.

Some google links are tracked when you click them

It's already within the formula and from what I'm seeing it's becoming a big deal.

The experiment went like this:

Site A had a very crawlable structure, no javascript or whatever and aimed the keyword X. It had a lot of indexed content, but the bounce rate and time spent was very poor.

Site B had next to no indexed content (all ajax), yet had very loyal visitors and a bounce rate of under 5% and also targetted the keyword X.

Result? B dominated A.

google toolbar, chrome, web accelerator thing, how quickly visitor comes back to google.com from the site... probably dozen different ways altogether...

I would be surprised if they don't use it, it makes too much sense to use bounce rate info in the rankings...

Did you know Google phones home clicks on results, even if you're not logged in? It's not done in an obvious way like Yahoo's redirect URLs; to the browser it's hard linked, but some additional background javascript quietly phones home each click.

google is evil

:party-smi

Google Toolbar, they can have javascript detect on the google results page, plenty of ways.
WG

I don't think the retention time (bounce rate) has that much of an impact, at least not yet. I've put disable back button code for surfers (but not bots) to increase the retention time and it had no effect on rankings. It does make sense to me though to use that as a guage of relevancy but its something blackhats could abuse pretty easily (faking a hit to google search and another fake hit to your site).
WG

SsssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssHHHHHhhh hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!


Damn....stop fucking telling people about the "bounce rate" and effects on SEO.

Now every fucking low life blackhat scum master is gonna exploit that feature.

I'm sure bounce rate will eventually have a big diffrence in serp listings. It makes since because it would be the best way to gage the value of a page for the surfer.

If no one stays on the page and bounces right off, it's a damn good chance the site is a link farm or a spam page.

if the only way they can tell is when the surfer returns to google, I think it will only be an issue for seo spammers who sites are nothing but garbage. I have one page sites that are just ads but have very nigh click through rates so the amount returning to google would be very small in comparison.