Despite Matt Cutts categorically saying Google does not use bounce rate data in their search rankings at SMX a couple of years ago, many SEOs still believe that Google does bounce rate, and demotes sites and/or pages that have a higher bounce rate.
Someone asked the question to Gary Illyes from Google on Twitter, and he replied that Google does not use Analytics or bounce rate in their search rankings.
@dnespo we don't use analytics/bounce rate in search ranking
— Gary Illyes (@methode) May 13, 2015
Many believe that Google tracks bounce rate, not through Analytics, but by using data that shows when a searcher clicks through to a site, and then clicks on another result in that same set of search results in a very short period of time, especially since Google does track those clicks.
That said, it is always good to try and improve your bounce rate. If your bounce rate is high, you should be looking at it and considering ways that you might encourage visitors to stick around. Are you including links to other articles? Is your content poorly written resulting in the bounces? Or if you drill down to the data, do you have a lot of visitors that may visit frequently but just happen to visit 1-2 pages at a time, but rack up considerably more page views over time?
Jennifer Slegg
Latest posts by Jennifer Slegg (see all)
- 2022 Update for Google Quality Rater Guidelines – Big YMYL Updates - August 1, 2022
- Google Quality Rater Guidelines: The Low Quality 2021 Update - October 19, 2021
- Rethinking Affiliate Sites With Google’s Product Review Update - April 23, 2021
- New Google Quality Rater Guidelines, Update Adds Emphasis on Needs Met - October 16, 2020
- Google Updates Experiment Statistics for Quality Raters - October 6, 2020
Ryan Jones says
It’s also important to remember that bounce rate is not always a bad thing.
For a search engine or directory, bounce rate is a good thing – it means the user found what they wanted.
Parallax scrolling sites might have a 100% bounce rate because they’re technically only one page.
Weather.com most likely has a high bounce rate too – as people generally don’t care about the weather in other locations once they see theirs.
I run a dictionary site. It also has a high bounce rate – as once people look up the word they wanted to define, they generally don’t look up other words too.
So, to penalize a site for a metric that’s not always bad wouldn’t make much sense.
Also… using GA data wouldn’t make sense either. It’s so easy to set it up wrong, and not every site uses it. It would be an AWFUL signal to use in rankings and probably open them up to some lawsuits.
I wish SEOs would use common sense more often on these type of theories.