Bounce rates' effect on rankings

Bounce rates do no affect search engine rankings. Bounce rates are used for determining quality of landing pages and can help measure the percentage of true visitors versus spammers/bots.

SO MANY QUESTIONS! JUST ASK ME IN ONE THREAD LOL

I feel something other, had over 100 websites in many different niches and I see the difference, bounce rate is the measure of quality of your website which is part of the success, I mean one of many factors google takes to give you specific rank for specific keyphrases.
They appreciate if you offer the people quality landing page, if the people feel confused once they go thru their search engine on your page they leave and this is what google doesn`t like and will not love you for that because it means your keyphrase you`ve ranked is not adequate as much as it should be to the landing page content cos people leaving just after they come to your LP. So I am sure the bounce rate is one of the factors you should consider, you should see fast rank improvement once you fix it. Make people curious, it always pays off (:

High bounce rates can also mean that your page has given the user EXACTLY what they need and then left the site

For this reason i doubt Google pays much attention to bounce rate

worry about bounce rate if you have a page that you want the user to interact with (ie buy something), then its a bad sign

I had a site that had an incredible bounce rate, less than 10% and time on site was running over 40 minutes, which was better than facebook at the time, and competition wasn't against the big boys and I still couldn't rank in the top spot for the keywords I was focused on, so I'd say they don't effect rankings.

I think that Bounce rate don't Influence to site's rank . My bounce rate is around 30-50% and have many backlinks but these key are not on top search engine ...
Who can help me ?

My main site has bounce rate of almost 90%; ranks fine

If bounce rate is high means your visitors are seeing that particular page and leaving without viewing other pages. High bounce rates typically indicate that the website isn’t doing a good job of attracting the continued interest of visitors.

I doubt bounce rate is a factor of SE algo, and here's why:

1. A quality site can have a high bounce rate.
2. If a searcher finds what they are looking for on the first page and then leaves, does that mean the site is poor quality? No. In fact, you would say that the site has done it's job of answering the searcher's question.

My affiliate sites regularly hit 60% - 80% bounce rates, mostly because I do a good job of getting them straight over to Amazon without having them trawl through my whole site (where the chance of converting them to Amazon lessens).

I've had the occasional visitor who spends quite literally 2-3 hours researching the products (as verified by Mouseflow).

My sites rank fine regardless of the 70% bounce rate. And also, Google's version of "bounce rate" is ridiculous. I much prefer Clicky's version of a bounce rate.

Your bounce rate is fine. Don't think it will have a negative impact on the rankings.

Thanks a lot for all the great answers!

Wow, sometimes I'm amazed by answers to questions on these forums.

Bounce rate, in most cases DOES effect rankings. Most cases, meaning Pogo Stick-ing. Pogo Stick-ing is when a Google user..

Types in search term
Goes to website
Immediately leaves website and goes back to Google
Goes to another website
Immediately leaves website and goes back to Google
Goes to another website
so on and so forth...

Obviously, more details go into Pogo Stick-ing but this is something that Google can easily see. If you don't think they use this type of info in their rankings, then you are just fooling yourself.

Bounce rate with other "user metrics" does affect rankings. For example, recently on my local IM forum I organized competition for the best post. It's 4th competition so far in last couple years. Activity on a forum is usually lower during summer months. Also, last year and a half I was so busy so I couldn't spend too much time increasing engagement on a forum.

But now I organized this competition, it's our community event that we got used to it. I also announced and promote that event. Regular members of a forum really like this competition, everybody gets involved and in the end we have some awesome posts after competition. I've set this competition to last 40 days and I am posting new updates every day.

This competition increased forum activity. Our bounce rate is better, avg. session duration is better, pages per session is better and all "user metrics" are just obviously better now. Paralel to user metrics improvement I have seen increase in Google traffic. Ok, Google traffic increases for various reasons, but I know my forum well, I compare it to various periods and I just know there aren't other factors that this could be attributed to. This year has less traffic than last year, however since we had increase in user metrics, Google traffic is stronger about 5000 visitors more than last year same period. That is overall 20% increase.

Huge and obvious example how user metrics affect rankings. Maybe they don't affect a lot. Maybe this affects few percent of overall Google algorhitam but if a website has a lot of pages, and grabs longtail traffic with a lot of content this can mean a lot.

Bottom line it has effect combined with other user metrics, it can be an important factor, but you shouldn't worry about it too much because it's just one of many factors. When you already have decent traffic than maybe you can play with bounce rate to increase Google traffic additionally, if you are just starting, I wouldn't think too much about this.