freejung - 5:45 pm on Jun 28, 2012 (gmt 0)

I just had a look at my analytics from this perspective, and I would say that average time on page correlates much more closely with quality. Actually, my lowest quality pages (in my opinion) typically have a very low exit rate, a high bounce rate, and a very low average time on page.

What's happening is that people who land on the page decide they don't like the site and leave, thus the high bounce rate. People who navigate in from other pages have already decided they like the site, but they don't like that particular page, so they navigate quickly to another page.

In any case, I think it's a lot more complicated than just exit rate and depends a lot on the nature of your site. But Google has a lot of data and can calculate correlations between all of these factors and perceived quality. However, I definitely think you're on to something in terms of just looking through your analytics to try to find metrics that indicate low quality pages.

Anyway, thanks for this insight, it has definitely led me to look at my pages in a new light and to realize that there are still pages on my site that people clearly don't like.

I'll work on improving or getting rid of those.