Can Adsense hurt your search engine rank?

[vero]

Just wondering what people think...

If you have Adsense, and someone clicks on an ad, they then leave your site, possibly soon after they get to it.
This will increase your bounce rate.

So if Google uses bounce rate to determine page rank - won't Adsense hurt your page rank?

And how do you keep that from happening - short of removing Adsense or running ads only at the very bottom of your pages?

[netmeg]

I have no reason to think that Google uses bounce rate to determine page rank (or page rank to determine much of anything useful)

In any event, it's certainly not been a problem for me. Over years and years.

[thatjen]

I think bounce rate is one factor google uses to determine how much traffic to send you. I worry because my bounce rate is high. But most people are only getting a few percent of people clicking on their Adsense units, so that's pretty minimal.

[netmeg]

Try the Google SEO forum here for more information on bounce rate. By itself it doesn't mean a whole lot - I have a huge bounce rate on some of my pages, because people come, see what they want, and leave - either via an ad, or a link, or they just go away. But it hasn't hurt either my rankings or my AdSense earnings.

Now if I were Google, I might pay attention to whether or not AFTER the bounce people came back to the search engine and picked another result - because that would indicate that the first choice wasn't a good user experience for them, and they didn't find what they wanted. I'd be more likely to use THAT as a factor than just raw bounce rate (where the user looks at one page and then leaves)

But that's me.