tedster - 11:39 pm on Mar 1, 2009 (gmt 0)

Bounce rates and other user action metrics have most definitely been studied by Google. For the past few months there's been quite a bit of webmaster and SEO buzz around the topic.

However, several Gogole spokespeople have said they found these signals too noisy to be effective in their algos. In addition, these numbers would also be very vulnerable to spamming. Even within the environment of a single website, web management usually follows trends rather than the "hard numbers".

My prediction is that data generated from user clicks will not ever be part of any automated relevance algorithm. Many times, user clicks do not represent actual engagement. Such data can be one tool for improving satisfaction with your site -- but that satisfaction is better measured in other ways by the search engines.