Thanks! Yes – I absolutely hear what you’re saying and I hadn’t looked at it that way until a few days ago when I read one of your posts that covered exactly this.

I can see that a high bounce rate is good on a sales site if the link they’re leaving through is your affiliate (or buy now) link in order to make a purchase. Not if it’s not!

I guess it also depends on how they arrive there. For example – if they arrive through a natural search and bounce, it’s probably because you’ve solved their problem, made a sale or your page is completely irrelevant.

If they arrive as a result of a content network ad (Adsense, Adbrite, etc) they’re more likely to be browsers, rather than people looking for a solution – does that make sense..?

I actually quite like to see people exploring the different pages on both my blog and my travel site, although that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to leave through an affiliate link! I guess it’s just my ego they’re feeding

Cheers,

Martin.

I don’t think “staying” is necessarily important to page rank or even to you as the owner. I don’t mean that it’s unimportant, but only that it doesn’t always matter and can even be exactly what you do not want!

For example, I have several pages that have been page 1 position one in Google for several years. They are “problem solving” pages; for example how to fix a lost Linux password.

If someone searches “lost root password” or “lost linux password”, they’ll get my page as the top Google hit. The bounce rate on those pages is almost 90% – meaning that all but a handful of visitors leave without reading anything else.

But why wouldn’t they? Losing a root password is a serious issue – when they find the answer, the most likely next step is to immediately go apply the fix and get on with whatever they were trying to do.

If I sort by bounce rate and ignore low volume pages, the pages with high bounce rates are usually “problem solvers”.

A blog that gets most of its traffic from regular subscribers (high repeat visitors) is going to show a smaller number of average page views per visit – a higher bounce rate- because those folks have visited regularly, have already read the other pages, why would they read them again?

Finally, for a sales website, trying to drive visitors to that final page where they place their order, a high number of page views per visitor – low bounce rate – might indicate confusion: they can’t find what they need to know and you may be losing sales because of it.

So bounce ratee and page views per visitor can mean good or bad..