diberry - 6:24 pm on Jun 26, 2012 (gmt 0)

Okay, then what I said definitely applies. A high exit rate combined with a high bounce rate would indicate a problem in many cases, but it definitely depends what the searcher was looking for.

And yet, this might explain why the SERPs are so uneven right now. Bad sites could rank if people bounce around them a while if it's not immediately obvious they're not going to find what they were looking for. Good sites could fail to rank because they're doing such a great job of addressing the query.

I think it might be safe to guess that Panda is (over)emphasizing this particular metric, but I don't think it's going to be uniformly helpful to everyone trying to figure out how to improve their site.

For what it's worth, though, I have several sites where the most popular entrance and exit pages are exactly the same pages, and I have other signals telling me the visitors do like what they read even though they left. I think none of these sites have been hit with Panda, or possibly one was but only very recently after Penguin pretty much trashed it.