Bounce rate

[toddburme]

With Google now all excited about bounce rate and the stickieness of the site. I have noticed that my blog has a higher bounce rate then the main page. This makes sense as some of the searches that come into the blog are pretty random. So I wonder if the blog is hurting the over all SEO efforts at this point? New to Google analytics as I sort of fear the Big Brother feel of Google but finally broke down and added it as I want to trace the customers that book so we drop some of our directory spending.

 

[Alibi Ike]

That, in a way, makes sense and in another way does not. For us, in our industry, we HAVE to have pages that may get high bounce rates (things to do in the area, directions from airports, restaurant lists, etc). So, are we supposed to dump these pages to maintain integrity? Or move them all 'off site' to the blog? Maybe I just answered my own question.
I get that Google doesn't want to give credit to a site stuffed with keywords that have nothing to do with the site, but how does that impact 'helpful' sites?

 

[toddburme]

Add in that somewhere someone translated my blog into another language and we are getting a lot of hits with 100% bounce rate on it... grrrr

 

[Alibi Ike]

Add in that somewhere someone translated my blog into another language and we are getting a lot of hits with 100% bounce rate on it... grrrr.

I am getting at least 50 hits a day on one blog post that has been scraped by websites with .ru extensions. I cannot find the link on their sites that gets people back to my blog, but they are definitely not hanging around or looking for a place to stay. (All the .ru sites are for gambling.)

 

[toddburme]

Same deal. Russian traffic but it is from a currency trading site. Also a asian site has a link to a reservation page that does not exist and some how Google Analytics is claiming a high bounce rate for it even though it 404's for me.

 

[swirt]

I would not sweat the bounce rate. There is no evidence that Google is limiting an entire site because some pages have high bounce rates. Most of these "signals" are applied on a page by page basis not applied to an entire site. Many pages have high bounce rates because Google does such a good job of getting people to the specific page in the first place.