Comments on: What’s More Important For Rankings, Bounce Rate Or Links?

By: Nick Stamoulis

Nick Stamoulis — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 13:31:26 +0000

@Market Born – Thanks very much for the comment. This is true in some cases but probably not always the case…

By: Market Born

Market Born — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 04:32:20 +0000

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.

By: Should You Change Your SEO Strategy For Bing?

Should You Change Your SEO Strategy For Bing? — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 13:04:46 +0000

[...] 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. [...]

By: Nick Stamoulis

Nick Stamoulis — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 15:48:44 +0000

@Dave – Thanks for reading and your comment. I really appreciate you sharing the other posts on your blog with our readers as well…

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:11:49 +0000

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….