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Hot Off the Press
(Article Contributed By Marie, of Sex Story Text - Posted on June 09th, 2010)
Ok so today we're going to be talking some more about Google ... I certainly wasn't planning on talking about Google today but there's some news that's come through via Twitter that's just too interesting not to talk about.
Right now in Seattle there's an advanced search engine conference going on and of course Matt Cutts ... the man from Google ... is there. As per usual there are plenty of people hanging on every word he utters and today he's uttered something very interesting.
There has been lots of talk over the last year or so about Bounce Rate ... the metric that helps us identify whether or not individual pages, or the whole site for that matter, is engaging the people who visit our sites. Bounce Rate is measured in percentage terms and a bounce rate of over 30 per cent is thought to suggest that a web page ... or website ... is just not engaging people.
As one noted analytics expert describes it ... a bounce rate of over 30 per cent suggests that people came ... saw ... and barfed. In other words, they didn't like what they saw so they went somewhere else.
A bounce rate of under 30 per cent is considered to be good and shows that people are engaged by what they find on a site. Now if people like what they see then wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that Google thinks more highly of pages and websites that have low bounce rate figures and ranks them more highly in the search results?
Well that's what a lot of search engine gurus have been suggesting for some time now but Steve and I have always been in two minds about Bounce Rate. Sure we can see that the argument put forward by those gurus just could be right and a site with a low bounce rate figure could be more appealing to Google ... and the other search engines.
But at the same time we have a number of sites with a bounce rate that's well over 50 per cent and Google loves them. With few inbound links, little in the way of compelling content and a site design that is very basic to say the least (and includes tables) these sites outrank ... at a local and regional level ... some of the biggest national competitors for a large number of very relevant terms.
So our thinking has always been that perhaps bounce rate isn't that important to Google after all. Perhaps Google has included Bounce Rate in their Analytics program, not because it's important to them, but because it's important to many website owners.
Our sites that have such poor bounce rate figures but do so well in Google are local directories so people are going to come to the site ... get the contact information they're looking for ... and leave straight away. But if you have a site that really does need to hold a visitor's attention then you do need a much lower bounce rate figure so you need to know whether people are hanging around or not.
So while the gurus have been sure that Bounce Rate is important when it comes to getting a good listing in the search results our experience has been quite different and now Matt Cutts has made some comments about Bounce Rate at that Seattle conference and what he has said is going to upset a lot of people who though that low bounce rates were synonymous with good search engine rankings.
It's been reported that Matt Cutts said that to the best of his knowledge the General Search Quality Team does not use Bounce Rate in their metrics.
You can expect to see a lot written about that in the coming weeks as a lot of people change their story and seek to protect their ‘guru' status.
Paid Links
It seems that Matt Cutts also had something to say about paid links. Google has had something of a vendetta against paid links for quite some time and they have made it clear that anyone who was paying for links or offering paid link spots for sale could expect to be caught and heavily penalized. And they've made lots of noise about it just in case anyone didn't understand that Google doesn't like paid links.
Of course that hasn't stopped a number of website owners ... even here in adult ... from offering paid links on their sites and they've been quite open about advertising their paid link offers. The fact that people are still openly advertising paid links combined with all that noise Google has been making about paid links has made me wonder whether Google really does have the ability to track down those wicked paid link people.
Perhaps Google really can't track down paid links and is just huffing and puffing about it in the hope that people will believe them.
Well what better place to re-affirm Google's intense dislike for paid links than a search engine conference. So it was no surprise that he had something to say about paid links at the Seattle conference. According to Matt Cutts Google is being “scalpel-like” in tracking down all those evil paid links that are out there on the Web. I guess it's up to you whether you believe him or not.
And now I'm off to build something even more evil than a paid link ... I'm off to build an animated GIF because that's what the client wants.
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