Bounce rates on my bingo site

[Squizzel]

So i am a bit worried about my bounce rates. I have a good average time on site (2.5 minutes) but my bounce rate is 69% at the moment. I heard its a bad quality signal to have a too high bounce rate. But to be honest, my high bounce rate is probably because i am sending visitors out through my affiliate links.

Thoughts? Id imagine all the other sites that share the serps with me have similar bounce rates and time on site, because all of our sites are fairly similar.

[leporello]

There is no evidence to show it's used as a ranking signal. I wouldn't worry about it. I had a one page site that was ranking in top 3 (and still does) for a v good term with 92% bounce rate, so i dont think its important.

[pokeraussie]

fwiw 69% is not a high bounce rate and to a large extent I think it depends on what your visitors are trying to accomplish. for an informational query you would expect the user to stay around for longer, but for certain keywords, and this would apply to the gambling niche immensely, the only purpose is to get a purchase/signup/optin or whatever and with all of the data at G's fingertips I am sure its not difficult for them to identify avg trends for your keywords and industry to know expected bounce rate. In other words, a high bounce rate may be typical of your type of site and intself does not suggest low quality content that could be detrimental to rankings. depending on the type of site, i wouldn't go as far to say not to worry it about it though, your aim should be to always improve the stickiness of your site if its not some crappy site that all you care about is signups.

[Sebastian]

The way I think about it is : User Interaction.

If you can improve the time visitors spend on your site, the number of pages they load, their return %, etc... then I've seen a correlation with better rankings.

A landing page will have very high BR ... Personally, I improved the User Interactions on a site (made it more helpful, made the key content more accessible, added videos, etc).

This noticeably reduced the BR, and the site shot up in the rankings.

I'd say focus on making the site as helpful as possible for visitors, without worrying about BR.

[pokerprop]

Bounce rates on my sites overall range from 61% to 83% fwiw (but I count affiliate clicks as a bounce). Never think I hit less than 61% anywhere. With most analytics stats time on site is 0.00 if they bounce and calculated if they visit another page.
If this is the case 69% bounce with 2.5 min average time on the site you're doing great if you goal is to get them to read content - advertisers in many niches would be happy with that. However because its an affiliate site and you're looking to bounce them off to an affiliate link your time on site might be a concern. What depends is an affiliate click counting as a bounce or are you tracking that as a second page. This all subjective - but anyways you can analyse those to death - in the end how are you ranking and what are you earning is what matters far more.

[pokerprop]

Actually I was just looking and my bounce rate for search traffic is lower - the high bounce comes from lot of social media traffic on some sites. Search traffic seems to be more 35-44% bounce rates on the few sites I just checked.

In any case bounce rate without looking at complete picture (as well as time on the site) means so little when talking about it without knowing all other variables.

[Mr-AJ]

My lowest bounce rate is 50 % and it's a non affiliate site where CTA is a contact form and no external affiliate links.
For affiliate sites where you want to get users to click your links sooner or later I think 60 - 70 % is pretty standard.

[pokeraussie]

Actually I was just looking and my bounce rate for search traffic is lower - the high bounce comes from lot of social media traffic on some sites. Search traffic seems to be more 35-44% bounce rates on the few sites I just checked.

In any case bounce rate without looking at complete picture (as well as time on the site) means so little when talking about it without knowing all other variables.

Yeah, generally social media traffic tends to have a much higher bounce rate, but I think its still worthwhile doing it. This is more of a topic for another post but if you are capable of making a piece of content go viral in a big way, the value from the natural links/traffic you pickup from this exposure cannot be bought.

[michael1981]

I don't think bounce rate is a ranking factor at the moment, but it might be in the future as Google gets more sophisticated. I guess it all goes back to that old saying, content is king. That's the only way you can keep visitors interested and keep them on your website.

[Squizzel]

Yeah, i am fairly certain its not a ranking factor. but its definitely a quality metric, same with time on site, and quick click back to the search results.

I think thats partially what was in the panda algo to weed out low quality sites. I figure if you have traffic and you score low on these metrics you will be flagged for review or panderized.