Few days back I had made a post about the larger amount of blog traffic that will be generated for search terms related to IPL 2009 and had asked my readers about how do they plan to take advantage of it. Harsh has left a comment that
Using Google trend to drive traffic is good strategy, but then if its not your niche , you will simply end up increasing your bounce rate. Is int it??
I was going to respond to him in the comments section. However I just realized that many established bloggers and webmasters seem to have accepted the theory that high bounce rate = bad quality as gospel truth. That is NOT necessarily TRUE.
I Love high bounce rate on certain pages
You read that right. I love high bounce rate. I actually brainstorm for quite sometime everyweek trying to increase the bounce rate. And trust me I have not gone mad. Not yet atleast
High Bounce rate means higher CTR for adsense
What are the normal advice you have heard/read for decreasing the bounce rate? Provide lot of interesting links to your other pages from the body of the post, at the end of your post, provide links to your most interesting posts from the sidebar etc. Now think about what those interesting links are doing to your adsense blocks. All those interesting links are competeing with the adsense blocks for the attention of the user. As you succeed in making the internal links more and more interesting, the adsense blocks continue to become less attractive. Is it any wonder that your CTR keeps going down.
Answer to some queries about high bounce rate raised in the comments
I think Nihar, Tarun and Harsh have raised some really valid points in the comments section. Instead of answering them in the comments, I will deal with them here.
- If you are blogging solely for money, then a higher bounce rate is good: I think this statement is true for most bloggers who monetize their blogs through ppc. However if you are monetizing your blog through affiliate products or if you want to monetize your blog by selling some service/product then this does not hold good
- If you want to convert a google reader into a regular reader then you need to give them some option: Again true. However you need to answer some questions to know if it is true for you
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- What % of your feedreaders actually read your blog daily? It is less than 15% for most of my blogs
- How much you would have earned by putting an adsense block at the end of your post
- What is the worth of the feed subscriber to you
- A High bounce rate will decrease your ranking: Fair and logical point. However I and several authority figures in SEO do not think that Google has started using bounce rate as one of the quality parameters. My experience with the post about core 2 duo vs dual core bears it out. I think this is because bounce rate as a ranking factor is quite noisy and susceptible to manipulation.
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