Bounce rate with affiliated outbound links and Rankings

[zahirshah]

Hi there,

We have implemented an affiliated website search box and products linking (with nofollow attribute) on all of our pages including the home page (before that we were having our own products pages and internal linking to them), with that our bounce rate has been increased and its around 70% now (which used to be 30 to 40 % before), its actually not bounce rate but its being counted as we are sending the traffic to the affiliate website via one direct click. We have noticed that our inner pages as well as the home page is losing the rankings gradually, although we have been doing the same strategy for our SEO and getting the same linking as before to our website (both deep linking and linking to the home page) …

So my question from you guys is that, do you think that the bounce rate could be the reason of dropping in the rankings? If yes, is there a way to tell Google that we are using the affiliation of other site and it is actually not bounce rate. Or what if we remove the Google analytics /webmaster tools codes from our website, will Google still notice the bounce rate of our website?

[TheMadScientist]

The following thread has quite a bit of information about bounce rate in it ... The most recent is starting on Page 9 @ 20 Posts Per Page: CNN: Growing Backlash to AdSense Farm Update [webmasterworld.com]

I'd start there. There's been too much posting on this in the last couple of days for me to keep re-posting the same thing, so better to just link imo. ;)

[zahirshah]

Thank you TheMadScientist, I read your posts over there .... so this means that bounce rate shouldn't be a factor in the rankings algo right ? If this is the case then what could be the reason of my rankings which have been dropped to 200 (which used to be at #1 and #2/3), these are actually the inner pages which are dropped (the home page is on rank instead of those specific pages on those keywords at #7 and #9 but the specific inner pages have been gone)

[tedster]

Is your content unique to your site, or is your content also available on other sites?

[zahirshah]

Hi tedster, I just checked out my home page content and there is a very poor site which has copied all my home page content :( .... there are few other sites as well, they have copied few of our paragraphs (i am sending you my website URL in a private message, Please analyze it and let me know what should i do now). Thank you so much for your help !

[DanAbbamont]

I'm just curious, why is there all this discussion on here about bounce rate affecting rankings?

[tedster]

In my post, I wasn't try to say that bounce rate affected rankings. I just used the high bounce rate as a way to describe how poor that particular traffic was.

[TheMadScientist]

I'm just curious, why is there all this discussion on here about bounce rate affecting rankings?

It happens ... Usually right after an update.

The only way I can see 'click-back' (bounce only means they left the page, click-back means they went back to the SERPs) being anything much more than noise (as we've discussed nearly ad infinitum lately) is if there's a anomaly between the results ... EG Surrounding pages average 60% click-back rate after 10 seconds but 'page-z' averages 85% after 3 second ... In that case, then I could see them applying it to the rankings, but otherwise?¿

Basically, it's a 'noisy signal' and sure they can try to apply it, but I think they could easily do more harm than good, unless there's an obvious 'one of these things is not like the others' pattern.

(It actually it would almost have to be a click-back, re-click to really say much, even with the discrepancy in time on page, imo.)

ADDED: One interesting thing Amit Singhal said in a recent interview is it's good to be cautious with the rankings ... My guess, based on his statement is they use click-backs very little if at all, because it's so noisy and there are so few ways to tell what it means ... I think they probably spend their time on more reliable signals.