Is Bounce Rate ALONE a Ranking Factor?
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Is Bounce Rate a Ranking Factor?
I love this test because when you do a Google search about it and you’ll see what comes up from experts. I really like the one from Barry Schwartz. He found the SEO RoundTable and he has been around for a long time. He is one of the authority figures. He gave some reasons as to why bounce rate is not a ranking factor. He says that Google does not have the ability to get that data.
He then said that in the past, bounce rate could be manipulated and that for some sites, a high bounce rate does not indicate a poor user experience or engagement. The idea that somebody searched and came to a particular site and they’ve got the information they needed on that page and they left. It wouldn’t be fair, is the idea.
I really found those reasons to be very disingenuous. Google certainly has the ability to get bounce rate data. They can get that on the sites that have Google Analytics installed. They can also probably get that in safe search. All safe searches run by Google. It is Google’s technology and they can get that kind of information and they wouldn’t need every website in order to gauge it. They can get that information as a subset and start extrapolating out from there.
Google says bounce rate can be spammed and manipulated. So as links. It can actually be everything in the algorithm and yet they still have an algorithm. If that were a real reason they would actually just shut down the whole operation and then some sites having a low bounce rate as good is not necessarily bad if you will, of course.
That is something that can easily be handled through search query niching. These types of searches, they would anticipate a certain range.
The bigger point is that, nothing that he has said, anybody has ever said knows that it is not a ranking factor because they tested it. Of course, that is where we come in.
In this test, regular set up, 5 pages and the one in the middle of the page and then to get the data, I used Mechanical Turk. It is a microworker site where you can get people to do things online. It’s not exactly SEO like crowdsearch.me but it still could be used for those kinds of purposes.
Pro-time, they actually shutdown a lot of my tests because you can put in the keyword what type of test it is and I was saying it was an SEO test. It turns out it was actually a violation of their terms of service and you can’t use their service to affect page rank but if you just describe it as for user experience or website testing, they are fine.
Dori: I found that really interesting since Amazon owns Mechanical Turk. Why would they care if it affects Google? I guess they're in each other's pockets, maybe.
I bet it is just lip service. Just call it user-experience testing and you are fine.
What was done in this situation was that traffic was sent to all the pages and then the idea is that on the experiment page, the page that we were manipulating to see if it is a factor, it gets one more click. The goal was the bounce rate to be close to 100% as possible on the control pages and as close to 0% as possible on the experiment page.
What was super exciting was that, even after a handful of visits, we got movement after just a couple of days. If you figure, it was probably 12 hours before things cycled in their system anyway. Very fast when we got the results on this. As the results continued to come in, it moved right to the top and that is where it stayed. It was interesting to note that the page that we were manipulating just in terms of how the systems work actually received a smaller amount of visits than the other pages. It wasn’t necessarily the sum total of visits but the quality of visits.
In the sense that the person moved on, the bounce rate was really low. In the end, the target page has a bounce rate of 25% and the other pages were 73-87%. Just in case of human error and, kind of, how things get tracked, we couldn’t get quite to 0 or a 100 but there’s definitely a significant difference between the other pages and the experiment page with the low bounce rate as the only factor in play as single variable, outranked all the others and it didn’t take long at all. It is definitely a factor and it is also a strong factor.
Putting that into play, what should we do with that? This is where it gets a little more arty than science because definitely there are going to be pages that would be expected that the bounce rate wouldn’t necessarily be as low as others, if you have an informational page for example. That is where you might want to get into the ideas of what would be a total target range for this particular page and shoot for that.
I would also space this out over months, if you were going to try to manipulate it so that you can move it. I wouldn’t do it all next Tuesday. I think that would make it look unnatural and silly. It is the kind of thing that you could gradually work on and get it down to what might be an acceptable range.
If you are dealing with something that might lead to a sales page, that would have a lower bounce rate than a page that is purely informational. Take that into consideration.
I found an interesting post in kissmetrics that I liked about bounce rate and they gave some percentages that are pretty reasonable starting points for the type of page that you have that you might want to work on the bounce rate and take it from there and do some research on it. Getting it down to zero is not the goal but to get it to what the acceptable range might be and then I think you would get the benefit of the ranking factor.
Dori: Eric said to go to Shortask.com and they don't care about doing anything SEO wise and they also said in the Basil's book that Amazon is one of the biggest investors in Google. I knew there was something but I didn't know that was that. Obviously they help each other under the table. That is probably why Google ranks Amazon pages.