What’s More Important For Rankings, Bounce Rate Or Links?
I’m becoming more and more convinced every day that Google is diminishing importance on inbound links and increasing importance on visitor traffic patterns, particularly bounce rates. Google’s complex ranking algorithms are constantly in flux. It’s change or be changed.
Why would visitor bounce rates be more important than inbound links? For several reasons.
- No. 1, inbound links have been gamed much too often and in too many sordid ways.
- Rising traffic patterns mean that a site is growing in popularity and is an indication that site visitors may be helping a website grow by sharing pages and information from that site with their friends. Since many website visitors are not webmasters and therefore not capable of providing links, they can still “vote” on the quality of a page by bookmarking pages, sharing through e-mail, and through other user actions like return visits. Google likely considers all of that in its ranking considerations.
- Bounce rates are particularly telling because a visitor landing on a page, particularly from a search result, only to find something other than what was intended and leaving immediately means that the webmaster did a poor job of “marketing” that page in the first place.
Links are still important, but they are losing importance and will probably never have the same status that they had in 2005. Traffic patterns are becoming much more important and I think Google will only get more sophisticated in the way that it measures traffic and bounce rates.
5 Responses to “What’s More Important For Rankings, Bounce Rate Or Links?”
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An interesting theory, but unfortunately an unlikely scenario. This has been floated a few times and at this point I can’t see it happening. And really, bounce rate is one of the less interesting of the implicit user feedback signals…
More here with a rant when SEL brought it up; http://www.huomah.com/Search-Engines/Algorithm-Matters/Is-Google-REALLY-using-bounce-rates-as-a-ranking-signal-.html
And here as a follow up to try and explain some of the problems with it; http://www.huomah.com/Search-Engines/Algorithm-Matters/The-final-word-on-bounce-rates-as-a-ranking-signal.html
One of the simplest examples of noise is understanding intent. If a search engine does it’s job and finds the user what they want on the first try, they may find info and leave… if the page returned wasn’t useful, they may dig 3-4 pages deeper. Thus in some cases a bounce may be a good thing, while not in others. There are plenty of places for noise (false-positives) with such an approach.
Moreover, every layer of signals added means more spam potential… implicit user feedback needs to have a pay-off in terms of quality gained and increased spam detection costs. Thus between establishing intent and dealing with spam-ability, it can be problematic.
…. I personally believe there is value, especially in a personalized setting, I can’t see that we’re there yet from an IR perspective….
@Dave – Thanks for reading and your comment. I really appreciate you sharing the other posts on your blog with our readers as well…
[...] One aspect of Chris’s article that I really appreciate is his discussion social media. I believe social media is going to be more important for optimization. It already is and I’ll tell you why. Traffic. Plain and simple. Social media delivers targeted traffic. If you can manage a successful social media campaign to deliver targeted traffic to your site that stays on your site then that increase in traffic coupled with a lower bounce rate can affect your rankings. We’ve discussed that before here and here. [...]
I have come across similar discussions before too. It could be a possibility but we cannot say for sure. The bounce rate could be easily manipulated with flashy banners. Say for example I have a page about “Marketing” and I have put an attractive banner saying “megan fox uncovered”. Even though my content on marketing be total crap i could convert traffic to another page, just because guys salivate just at the mention of the name today.
I was wondering if such things are fool proof.
@Market Born – Thanks very much for the comment. This is true in some cases but probably not always the case…