I need to write a long rant-like post on the emphasis Google has on Bounce rates when a high rate can (sometimes) be a measure of success…

See the Twitter post via @nzbase here.

I felt obliged to go ahead and describe exactly why I believe Google has issues with the way it uses Bounce rates as a measure of success in helping to rank pages in their search.

Here is an excerpt from a recent post in the Google Webmaster Central Blog from Susan Moskwa a Webmaster Trends Analyst with Google.

…If I don’t track my PageRank, what should I be tracking?
#2 Bounce rate
A “bounce” is when someone comes to your website and then leaves without visiting any other pages on your site. Your bounce rate is the percentage of visits to your site where the visitor bounces. A high bounce rate may indicate that users don’t find your site compelling, because they come, take a look, and leave directly. Looking at the bounce rates of different pages across your site can help you identify content that’s underperforming and point you to areas of your site that may need work. After all, it doesn’t matter how well your site ranks if most searchers are bouncing off of it as soon as they visit…

Source: Google Webmaster Central blog post.

#1 was Conversion rate and #3 was Clickthrough rate (CTR).

The real problem I have with the Bounce rate (and this closely ties in with the Conversion rate too) is that these are very strongly weighted to e-commerce or business websites i.e. websites that have shopping carts, purchases or at least are looking for leads.

Where these metrics fall over is when the website in question is not looking for a sale, lead or other call to action but is instead interested in either providing the searcher with a relevant answer to their search or is just interested in providing someone with the right information when they need it.

In an e-commerce situation, if the searcher comes to a page and then leaves the website again from that page, it’s generally considered a failure in the websites’ ability to interact with the searcher and have them move onto the next page on their site however this is just not neccesarily the case for every website and definitely is not the case for most content, blog or brochure websites.

In the case where a page has excellent usability, answers the searchers question in a few seconds and then the user leaves the website to go and do something else (therefore creating a high Bounce rate that Google says is bad) then that website is going to be majorly disadvantaged by their quality of usability.

If instead the searcher has to look around on that page for the answer, didn’t find it, clicks on to another page and then another and then eventually finds the answer. That website would have a lack of usability, a lower level of satisfaction for the searcher however they would have a lower Bounce rate and therefore according to this metric that Google has suggested is highly relevant, they would be promoted as a good website and return higher on the Google SERPS.

Should a website reduce its usability to gain better Bounce rate metrics for Google?

Some people here would jump in and say that even if the searcher ends up on only a single page then hopefully Google is taking something like time on the page as an indicator for that page being the source of the content that the searcher was really looking for. I would suggest that the better the usability on the page, the quicker the searcher will find the answer they’re looking for and therefore there’s a potential for time on page to be a negative indicator as well.

Let me know your thoughts on this situation in the comments, do you agree or disagree?

Within a market such as New Zealand this is an understandable belief considering the top-heavy feel to the market where only a few large media brands cover

the majority of the press coverage within the country and press release marketing is the realm of PR consultancies.

That said, it is not a good reason to ignore the benefits of a well written, regular press release campaign that is aimed specifically at the mid-range news distribution market online including PR channels like the PR.co.nz press release service where the distribution of New Zealand press releases online is available.

While building a press release that is targeted at main stream media can take many hours to get quality, compelling content and tone into the piece of written material, it is not necessary to spend this level of time on something that is aimed at the wider market.

There are a few major benefits of building a persistent and interesting profile of press releases on about your brand on your website and within your local vertical online.

Every release you put out there, if presented in the right places, will be picked up by a number of news and press release feeds that will help to distribute it around the New Zealand web.

As long as you can keep the content interesting to your target market (and hopefully you suppliers as well) then it’s positive reinforcement of your brand on a regular basis, helping to bring you to top-of-mind for that prospective clients.

The search engine optimisation benefits of well written topical press releases that have links back to your website are well documented but not as well used as many people would imagine. At present it is largely the search optimisation companies themselves that are implementing this when it could easily be marketing teams or content writers for the company who develop these press releases prior to approval from management.

Another benefit is a growing level of content on your website that is topical and fresh helping to bring customers back as well as helping your own search engine optimisation through regularity of implementing fresh content on your website which is becoming more import over time with Google.

Too often businesses believe the only way to bring regular readership and content to their website is to start a business blog however a blog post is not easily passed around the community online and is quite unlikely to get picked up by any other media outlets online (mainstream or not).

The idea of using a blog service (e.g. WordPress) to facilitate the regular posting of solid press releases either to complement a business blog or even in replacement of it has not been well explored but may well be the answer for some companies who prefer a slightly more structured approach as well as the external media benefits of writing press releases instead of blog posts.

Here are a few NZ specific PR distribution channels you might consider posting your latest press release to;

PR.co.nz – New Zealand Press Releases
InfoNews – infonews.co.nz
Scoop – Scoop.co.nz, independent media releases
Geekzone – Geekzone.co.nz, IT related news releases

Matt Cutts is clear in this interview that rel=canonical is the lesser of the two options;

Yes, to call [rel=canonical] a poor man’s 301 is not a bad way to think about it. If your web server can do a 301 directly, you can just implement that, but if you don’t have the ability to access the web server or it’s too much trouble to setup a 301, then you can use a rel=canonical.

It’s an interesting suggestion as in real-use cases the 301 is (in my experience) being used as a pure redirect when a page and/or domain has been shifted from one URL to another. The idea that rel=canonical in a page achieves the same result seems to be missing the point of what a 301 is actually being used for.

I’m interested in hearing of any real-world cases where rel=canonical has been used instead of a 301?

This is a pretty stunning idea considering the level of decision making within the online industry that currently happens based on the statistics that are displayed in Google Analytics.

After talking to a few others about this issue, it turns out there may well be a growing question surrounding the importance that Google Analytics has in the decision making process. There’s this case study completed by Michael Martinez on SEOMOZ which, while a few years old, asks some very pertinent questions. How often have you questioned your Google Analytics package?

Thinking back 5 or 6 years in the online industry (prior to Google entering the web analytics vertical through acquisition) webmasters would regularly question anyone who quoted page views or page hits as it was widely accepted that the stats were particularly varied and often inaccurate.

With a company like Google taking on the mantle of free web analytics and effectively taking over the free market with a sophisticated product, the question just doesn’t get asked as often as it used to be. Do too many online professionals blindly trust Google to give accurate data through what is an imperfect tracking medium?

There is an interesting article available by Brian Clifton who took two sites and compared their tracking between Google Analytics, Yahoo Web Analytics and Nielsen Site Census. Here was the basic conclusion of his findings;

The methodology of page tagging with JavaScript in order to collect visit data has now been well established over the past 8 years or so. Given a best practice deployment of Google Analytics, Nielsen SiteCensus or Yahoo Web Analytics, high level metrics remain comparable. That is, can be expected to lie between 10-20% of each other. This is surprisingly close given the plethora of accuracy assumptions that need to considered when comparing different web analytics tools.
As tracking becomes more detailed – for example the tracking of transactions, custom variables, events and outbound links, the greater the discrepancies of metrics will be between the web analytics tools.

General discussions with a couple of industry people has suggested using a product like AWStats as a test against the particular product you’re using (e.g. Google Analytics) to make sure you’re not missing a part of the bigger picture through the use of only a single analytics package.

Do you have any data on the subject?

In reality, very little.

While the deal has been brokered to give Microsoft and Yahoo the opportunity to tackle Google in most markets (specifically the US where Google has 70% coverage), in New Zealand Google has well over 90% coverage which leaves very little room for competitors who are looking to lift their percentage of the search market above double digits.

One interesting question for those who follow local search is if in NZ Google is #1 and #2 is about to be Bing/MSN/Yahoo/Xtra, then who is #3?

Competition in search is a good thing, it helps promote innovation and pushes companies to facilitate better ROI for the advertising dollar. Some commentary on the deal has already begun discussing the openings potentially left for start-ups and smaller search alternatives that are nimble enough to move with the market as new needs are seen.

If you’re interested in reading more about the deal from their own perspective, they have set up a site specifically to present the case to the public – http://www.choicevalueinnovation.com/

I’ve needed a place to put general posts on the online market in NZ as well as discussions about things I’m finding interesting in the wider online world so it’s about time nzbase.com came back online.

I’ll be bringing this site back up to speed piece by piece and potentially porting the pre-2004 seo & sem stuff just for the hell of it. We’ll see how many late nights I’m willing to put in and how far the royal “we” get on that one