Ryan Jones published an article that delved into things people think matter in relation to ranking in Google but really don’t.
Some of these things I see mentioned on Namepros and social media. Jones goes onto list 15 things.
I have heard a few people swear by the fact that bounce rate and time on site matters. Jones does not agree.
He wrote:
Direct Website Visits. Time on Site. Bounce Rate. GA Usage
None of these are factors.
According to W3techs, only 54% of websites use Google Analytics. Most big brands and fortune 500 sites use Adobe Analytics instead. Chrome only has a 45-60% market share depending on what source you look at.
In other words, there’s no reliable way for Google to get these metrics for more than half of the web.
Big brands are dominating rankings and Google doesn’t have their analytics data. Even if they did, it’s way too noisy of a signal.
For many sites, the bounce rate is fine. Take a weather site; most users only look up the weather in one location. A bounce is normal.
For other sites, time on site being low is good, too. Take Google itself — its goal is to get you off the search results and onto something else as quickly as possible.
Other things like domain age and domain registration period are dismissed.
Read the full article on SearchEngineJournal.com.
Earlier this year an article from Matt Southern discussed if removing comments affected rankings.
This is pretty much a click bait article by Search Engine Land and Im not biting. To use Weather.com as an example of bounce rate doesn’t matter is stupid. Not all websites are created equal…but I won’t waste my time debating all their points this is clearly an article thats designed to get clicks.
Pretty sure Search Engine Journal (not land) does not need to worry about clicks, they do well. Everything Ryan stated was true.
Interesting thanks for posting.