Is this Google update related to BOUNCE RATE?

Hi all,

Some of my sites were hit hard in this Google update, while others were unaffected. This gives me clues as to what's going on .

First of all though, please bear in mind that this update isn't just targeting EMD's. Get that out of your head - it's NOT the only purpose of the recent update. My worst affected sites don't use EMD's, whereas my crappy cheapgreenwidgets.com site I bought here on the forum has had a surge in traffic !

I'm starting to think that BOUNCE RATE and PAGES/VISIT are the keys. However, as well as your own site's bounce rate, I'm wondering if Google is benchmarking your site against your COMPETITORS.

OK here's the thing. I have some dating advice blogs. They have a bounce rate of around 62%, and average around 2 pages per visit. That's pretty good. HOWEVER, I do also run a dating site, and this has a bounce rate of 46% and 8 pages/visit. So you can see that my blogs aren't nearly as compelling as an actual dating site.

This is all well and good, but I still don't see many dating sites listed for many keywords. Even worse, for one keyword I saw the same site listed 15 times in the top 30 results, plus one result from a forum spam posting. And talking of forums, I do now see an awful lot of forums, answers type sites and that sort of stuff. One thing I don't see much of now are blogs. And I don't see an awful lot of quality either. Opinions yes, quality no.

SMALL NICHE SITES EXCEPTION: I must mention that some of my sites have been unaffected. This puzzled me, because they use pretty much identical techniques (same WP templates, same sort of articles). But then I figured that bounce rate and other statistics aren't very accurate with low traffic levels. So I guess that Google don't penalise small sites for having low bounce rates, but once they rank for big keywords then they'll probably get smacked down . This is also why my cheapgreenwidgets.com site is doing OK, especially as its in a niche where all the competitor sites are junk (most sites are built by micro-business owners). It might also be true that Google aren't applying these metrics for lower volume keywords.

OTHER NICHES: I used to rank well for IT questions. Now I don't. Google now likes crowdsourced solutions sites (e.g. StackOverflow). Tropical fish - I've gone from that niche as well. Google now loves fishkeeping forums (of which there are hundreds).

So what can we learn from this? Well improving your site or links is probably a waste of time - you're barking up the wrong tree. I guess it might be possible to revive a site by taking off the posts that were targeting big keywords (i.e. 1000+ monthly volume). I might try this.

I'd say if you have a PRODUCT, then you'll need to learn how to make money from PPC campaigns. I guess you knew this anyway. Search for watercoolers and above the fold, you see 13 Google ads and 3 organic results. Google will continue to cream off profits on the best queries until it gets some kind of unfair competition lawsuit.

If you have a blog or authority site, turn it into FORUM. Either that, or you need to target long, long, long tail keywords (<500 monthly volume).

Finally, if you just want to make money online, look beyond niche sites.

I wish that Bounce Rate Elimintor was still for sale, although I'm not sure it would help recover a site's rankings. Let me know if you know anything about this plugin.

Anyway, let me know your own observations .