Why You’re Bounce Rate Shouldn’t Keep You Up at Night

People have been questioning whether a relationship between bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who land on your site and return to the referrer after viewing only one page) and search engine rankings exist for some time now.  Despite past signals that Google employees considered bounce numbers too “noisy” to use effectively as part of the site rating process, rumors persist that the search engines are looking at bounce as one factor in the process.

A recent post by David Leonhardt, for instance, builds a case for why people might want to start looking at their bounce numbers if they’re interested in achieving optimal search engine performance.  Leonhardt concludes that high bounce rates will hurt a site’s SEO status:

Cheap sites that do a lot of link-building - bouncy SEO - counting on large volumes of traffic to offset poor conversion rates, will suffer - because the search engines will stop sending them that traffic. 

 It’s just a matter of time.  Or perhaps it has already started.

Leonhardt’s argument has a great deal of prima facie appeal.  It’s well-outlined and features some good reasoning.  However, the information we have from the folks at Google contradict his assessment.

Matt Cutts, the face of Google to those in the SEO blogosphere, recently said:

Without reading the article, I’ll just say that bounce rates would be not only spammable but noisy. A search industry person recently sent me some questions about how bounce rate is done at Google and I was like “Dude, I have no idea about any things like bounce rate. Why don’t you talk to this nice Google Analytics evangelist who knows about things like bounce rate?” I just don’t even run into people talking about this in my day-to-day life.

That seems like compelling evidence that Google isn’t relying on bounce stats in any significant way when it comes to building its search engine results.  

Some people have been pointing to Avinash Kaushik’s (Google’s Analytics Evangelist) remarks on the topic as evidence that bounce may be playing a role in results.  However, if one really reads what Avinash is saying, it appears as though his answers are more about how Google Analytics defines “bounce” than it is about how Google’s algorithm uses the metric to determine rankings.

Adam Lasnick, one of the Google Search crew has also given us a pretty strong indication that there are more important things to worry about than bounce rates:

If you’re talking about bounce rates in the context of Google web search and webmaster-y issues, then we really don’t have specific guidance on bounces per se; rather, the key for webmasters is to make users happy so they find your site useful, bookmark your site, return to your site, recommend your site, link to your site, etc. Pretty much everything we write algorithmically re: web search is designed to maximize user happiness, so anything webmasters do to increase that is likely to improve their site’s presence in Google.

It is possible that bounce rates could influence search engine results, but it’s unlikely that they do so in any meaningful way.  Additionally, the people at Google are bright enough to realize that traditional bounce isn’t always a negative.  They understand the concept of blogs, for instance, that only display one post per page and that people may visit for only that story.  They know there are good one-page sites designed to accomplish particular goals.  They’re also bright enough to realize that all bounces aren’t created equally.  If they are examining bounce, you can bet their also evaluating the length of time that transpires between a visit’s start and the subsequent visitor departure.

The bottom line?  Don’t worry too much about bounce from the SEO perspective.  Obviously, lower bounce rates are preferable for multi-page sites for a host of very good reasons.  SEO, however, doesn’t necesarily seem to be among them.