Is Bounce Rate A Ranking Factor? SEO Newsletter, Week 32, 2022

Hi SEO Geeks,

I am back with the new edition of SEO Bits. If you like the information in this Newsletter, please like, comment and share it to appreciate the efforts I put in to create these Newsletters just for you.

And if you haven't subscribed yet, please make sure to do so by clicking the Subscribe button in the top right corner.

SEO Tip Of The Week

Is Bounce Rate A Ranking Factor?

According to me, Bounce Rate is not a ranking factor. The reason I say this is because a high Bounce Rate does not always indicate a low-quality page.

Bounce rate could also mean that the user got the information he needed and hence closed the tab.

However, when Bounced traffic results in Pogo Sticking (i.e user hits the back button to revisit search results and then clicks another result), it becomes a ranking factor.

Let me explain to you with a few examples.

Suppose, the user searches for "Burger King Contact Number". The user clicks on the first result. He does not find the number or find an incorrect number and hence hits the back button to go back to the SERP.

Next, he clicks on the second result, finds the information, and goes on to close the Tab.

If you notice, in both cases, the traffic bounced. Right?

But the first instance led to pogo-sticking. This indicates that the page MIGHT be a low-quality page.

However, in the second case, the page gives out the necessary information satisfying the user's intent and hence the second page is a quality page.

But why did I say that the first page MIGHT be a low-quality page? That's because for certain keywords Pogo Sticking is natural.

Let's take an example of the "How To Make Money Online" keyword. A user searches for this Keyword, checks out the entire page for information, gains knowledge from the page (Satisfies User Intent of gaining knowledge) but still hits the back button to visit another page to look out for more information.

Here, in this case, even though Page1 satisfied the user's intent, it still led to pogo-sticking. However, this was not because page 1 was a low-quality page, but because for such keywords, users usually look forward to getting as much information as they can and so visit multiple pages.

So, how does Google determine if a page is a quality page or a low-quality page if Pogo sticking happens?

Rankbrain takes care of it. Rankbrain measures the average pogo-sticking for each keyword. If you are above the average, it considers your page to be high-quality, if you are below the average, then Google considers it to be a low-quality page and will shuffle the results until it finds the best match.

That makes sense, right?

P.S: Google denies using both bounce rate and pogo sticking as a ranking factor. But if Google always told the truth, it would be too easy to decipher and trick their algorithm, right? So always take Google's advice with a grain of salt.

SEO News Of The Week

1. Google Search Is Very Broken Now: Outages, Indexing Issues, Pages Missing & More

By Barry Schwartz @ SERoundTable

Barry talks about the Google outages as well as Google indexing issues which apparently were not related to the outage.

2. Google Featured Snippet Callouts, False Premises, MUM & More

By Barry Schwartz @ SERoundTable

Google is now using Mum to show Featured Snippets. Barry gets into the details.

SEO Articles Of The Week

1. Google’s Algorithms Can Understand When Sources Agree On Same Fact

By Matt G. Southern @ Search Engine Journal

Matt talks about how Google can now understand when various sources agree on a fact using the Google MUM.

2. What Is Topical Authority & How Does It Work

By Loren Baker @ Search Engine Journal

Loren Baker talks about what topical authority is, why is it important from the SEO perspective, and how you can build topical authority for your website.

3. How to Improve SEO Rankings in 11 Steps

By Kelly Lyons @ Semrush

Kelly Lyons lists down 11 steps that can help you improve your SEO Ranking. A must-read article.

4. What Is SEO? A Comprehensive Guide for 2022

By Nabilla Restuningrum @ Hostinger

Nabilla talks about the basics of SEO. A handy guide for SEO Beginners.

SEO Tool Of The Week

Query Hunter is a free tool developed by Joe Davies . It helps you leverage data from Google Search Console by applying quick filters. With the tool, you can quickly find keywords that are getting a lot of impressions but you haven't used them in the content.

The set-up for the tool is a bit technical and lengthy process. But it's definitely worth the time.

That's it for this week's SEO Newsletter

I hope you found this week's SEO newsletter helpful. Stay tuned for next week's edition.

Do share your feedback and suggestions in the comment sections below. That will really help me make this Newsletter even better.

Thank you for reading and until next time, Happy Optimizing