Yesterday, I stumbled across a video of Matt Cutts from Google talking about a variety of topics that influence the SERPs. He told a story about two websites competing for the top spot. One site was just five pages and did not have much content. The other site that was at the top was also a small site that had a video to engage visitors, making them stay longer.

I know bounce rate and the SERPs is not a brand new topic, but its also one that hasn’t gotten a grand amount of attention either. It’s well known that link bait will help get a page to the top of the SERPs and this has been widely assumed to be because of all of the links pointing to the page.

But, there is a secondary reason as well, which is that visitors tend to stay on link bait pages longer (low bounce rate) and tend to move from this page to other pages on the same site. Google Analytics measures bounce rate to give webmasters an idea of how interested the visitors are to a particular website and the average time they spend there.

Measuring bounce rate as part of a page popularity ranking does make sense in most cases. There are a few pitfalls, however, in giving too much weight to bounce rate in the SERPs.

Using bounce rate is a way to drop spammy websites down in the SERPs while promoting authority pages to the top. But, just how do the search engines tell the difference? One would think that a typically spammy site with lots of ads and little content would have a high bounce rate as person after person would be hitting the back button quickly on this page.

But, what about another page that has simple, but quality content that give the visitor what they need immediately and they get what they need and also hit the back button on the browser quickly. For instance, a web page with a singular funny picture and short caption may give the visitor a laugh and they will then move on quickly to the next topic of interest.

There is also the issue of many visitors who like to open several windows at a time to different pages or leave there computers with a page open. This will give a page at least from one visitor a low bounce rate, but what if for some odd reason there was a trend of similar behavior by visitors on this particular page? This would artificially inflate the bounce rate.

More likely than not, bounce rate is just one small factor that search engines consider (if some of them track this information at all) when developing their ranking algorithms and positions in the SERPs. The moral of the story is that content is still king, link bait rules and by keeping visitors on your pages as long as possible, you certainly can’t go wrong.

Filed under: Search Engines