Google Ban's auto blogs and blog dripping!

Good luck with that:rolleyes: Google is about as two-faced as a company can be, and most of its dribble it puts out is to manipulate webmasters into doing its bidding and to increase its bottom line. I encourage people to actually think for themselves rather than mindlessly following others' advice, including Google's advice.

In any event, note that while Google does have a TOS with their products Adsense, Analytics and Webmaster Tools, Google does not have a TOS with respect to the types of sites to be included in its search engine and the ranking standards with respect to those sites. I hear that on here on WF quite often by people who don't understand what a TOS actually consists of.

They can measure it but they can't measure it in a statistically meaningful way so that it can be accurately applied to search result rankings.

If you can demonstrate actual, real world, proof of this, I'll be happy to make my parody product a reality.

Jacob: This is also where I am at on the topic of bounce rate.

I am not talking about Google Analytics or traffic sourced from any third-party websites.

I am suggesting that if a searcher clicks a link in Google's search results, goes to the page, and hits the Back button in less than 30 seconds or 15 seconds or 5 seconds, that is a reliable measure that Google can process to determine the relevance of a particular web page in that set of search results.

Google knows what the average bounce rate is for the average site.

I have sites that bounce 80% within 30 seconds. I have others that bounce 60% of visitors within 30 seconds. My site statistics don't measure under 30 seconds.

But as the source of an incredible amount of traffic to third-party websites, Google should have a clue what is average and what is not.

For the sake of the argument, let's suggest that 80% of web users hit the back button in 30 seconds. That would be the base-line.

If they are measuring the number of people that use the Back button in the search results, to go back to Google to try another search result, it would often be a valid assumption that the first-clicked site did not meet the search-users expectations on the particular search.

If the searcher uses another link to bounce, that is irrelevant, because the searcher found a reason to keep going forward, rather than going Back.

Honestly, Google Analytics is not a good tool to measure any of this data for Google's search index. Google Analytics, though widely used, still has a small footprint on the whole, therefore by taking from a small subset of information, Google would be shooting themselves in the foot to incorporate Google Analytics information into its search algorithms.

Google has said publicly that it does not use Google Analytics in its search algorithms.

That is fine, but you should never believe that Google is always telling you everything you need to know. In fact, you should never always take Google at face value. Google through its various mouthpieces, including Matt Cutts, is in the business of telling us what they want us to know, instead of what we need to know.

When listening to Googler's talk, you should always be reading between the lines, because you can bet your bottom dollar that they are not giving you the full story.

I have read about Bounce Rates in Caffeine, from a number of SEO sources, and if I were a Google engineer, I would be incorporating Bounce Rates as I described it above.

I often try to put myself in the position of how I would do things if I were Google. And in doing so, I have managed to gain a lot of insight that has allowed me to keep thousands of page one Google rankings, in some cases, for many many years.

This past summer, Danny Sullivan interviewed Matt Cutts at SMX Advanced. During that interview Sullivan asked about bounce rates. This is how Sullivan described that exchange:

Maybe that is the end of it, and maybe we should be reading between the lines.

All I know for sure is that I truly believe that the Back Button is a valid measure of whether one particular search result is relevant in a list of ten search results.

If I were a Google engineer, I would most likely include a "ding" to your website, if too many people used the Back Button to escape your website.

80% Bounce Rate or whatever is the baseline.

60% Bounce Rate is a good sign that the search result is a good result.

And a 95% Bounce Rate is also a good indicator that the search result should be given less importance in Google's search results.

You be the judge.