How does Google know our site's bounce rates?

Kingofknights

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i read people saying bounce rate can have impact on rankings. wondering how does Google know of our visitors bounce rates?

for direct traffic i don't see how they can know. maybe for Google search they have a tracking they put on their visitor or something?
 
From the webmaster tools code. Of course they do track websites but with the code it makes things much easier.

Everyone is tracked somehow or another by someone. You use Google's browser, click on their search engine. I don't think Google is as big on tracking as others but I could be wrong. There is always more profit in marketing reports and analysis. This is the same reason why marketers flock to trends to find out what's the newest trend.



As far as bounce rate goes, you will hear so many crazy things all over the net. I'm a SEO God, your site will not rank because, it will rank if you do this.... By this Ebook or that software to rank your site.

Me, I think Bouce rate is a load of crap but hey what ever makes a good topic to discuss.


In the end just experiment on your on. Try many different things to see what works and what does not. Don't buy just one domain buy a handful. If you try different strategies and different methods no matter what you will loose a few domains to the garbage dump of Google penalties.
 
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Even if you don't place analytics code, google can track the bounce rate. How? When a user searches anything through google search, google most probably ( we can't tell for sure, right?) tracks every click and checks if the user went to another result (and probably.. the time between two clicks..too) after clicking on your result. If that's the case, then google will consider your link as irrelevant to the keyword searched, because it did not solve the purpose.

Think about it...
 
Even if you don't place analytics code, google can track the bounce rate. How? When a user searches anything through google search, google most probably ( we can't tell for sure, right?) tracks every click and checks if the user went to another result (and probably.. the time between two clicks..too) after clicking on your result. If that's the case, then google will consider your link as irrelevant to the keyword searched, because it did not solve the purpose.

Think about it...
and if open all the websites on a page 1 for example at the same moment? they will think that every site is relevant?
 
Well that is something that only google can answer. They generally use all the tools they have in their arsenal. So.. they might use something else for that..
and if open all the websites on a page 1 for example at the same moment? they will think that every site is relevant?
 
It's simple.

Do a Google search for anything you like, then right click any of the SERPs and "Copy link location" or "Copy shortcut". Then paste that somewhere you can read it, and you'll notice that it's not a direct link to that website. It is, for all intents and purposes, a tracking link.
So when you click it, you get sent to the target website - and likewise, when you click back in your web browser, your browser takes you back to that tracking link - which then brings you back to the SERPs.

By measuring clicks through that tracking link, in both directions, Google can easily determine bounce rate - regardless of whether you have GA installed or not.
 
Google has data on how many times some one searched a specific term, how many times the different search results were shown and which one of those search results was clicked the most - so, in short they know which site people are clicking on the most.

For bounce rate, they won't know that unless you have google analytics installed or if a user just comes back to google and clicks on something else.. but I don't think that has a HUGE affect on ranking
 
They also use Chrome to collect data, according to my own testing. I have tested chrome, as well as chromium (the open source solution that G supposedly has not tampered with), and I have set up a firewall that limits outgoing connections. I found that, when both chromium and chrome was idle, it suddenly started requesting this:

"On [date], 2014, Chromium tried to establish a connection to ssl.google-analytics.com on port 443 (https). The request was denied via connection alert."

I am not sure why the browser itself would want to connect directly to google analytics when I was not using it, but based on other things that has come to light about googles monitoring and tracking of its users, I'm sure chrome collects a lot about use browsing habits and then sends it to google. I tested it on multiple computers, and the same thing happened, Chrome would all of a sudden connect to analytics while I wasn't browsing. Strange thing is, I have never seen anyone else write about this, although I successfully replicated this behaviour in Chrome multiple times (I just installed it, and it soon started calling back to GA, on any computer). Google is a shady business...
 
I know they don't like you using their stuff and messing with it like when you use the ChromeDriver for Python scrapers. They do keep track of a butt load of information.
 
Even if you don't place analytics code, google can track the bounce rate. How? When a user searches anything through google search, google most probably ( we can't tell for sure, right?) tracks every click and checks if the user went to another result (and probably.. the time between two clicks..too) after clicking on your result. If that's the case, then google will consider your link as irrelevant to the keyword searched, because it did not solve the purpose.

Think about it...

Yea this, if visitors come from Google search then they track returning visitors and visitors that come back and click another result as well.

For direct traffic, as said above, google analytics, google toolbar data maybe?
 
when you are searching something within google or using chrome browser, goog record all the data. its similar that when you are using your telco service and they may kept and record all your data as well
 
They also use Chrome to collect data, according to my own testing. I have tested chrome, as well as chromium (the open source solution that G supposedly has not tampered with), and I have set up a firewall that limits outgoing connections. I found that, when both chromium and chrome was idle, it suddenly started requesting this:

"On [date], 2014, Chromium tried to establish a connection to ssl.google-analytics.com on port 443 (https). The request was denied via connection alert."

I am not sure why the browser itself would want to connect directly to google analytics when I was not using it, but based on other things that has come to light about googles monitoring and tracking of its users, I'm sure chrome collects a lot about use browsing habits and then sends it to google. I tested it on multiple computers, and the same thing happened, Chrome would all of a sudden connect to analytics while I wasn't browsing. Strange thing is, I have never seen anyone else write about this, although I successfully replicated this behaviour in Chrome multiple times (I just installed it, and it soon started calling back to GA, on any computer). Google is a shady business...

Have you yet noticed that Google installs its Chrome update service as a system service to bypass firewalls? There is a lot Google does through Chrome that does not pass the light of day. But then it is really nodifferent than IE or FF, just uses different mechanisms.
 
It's simple.

Do a Google search for anything you like, then right click any of the SERPs and "Copy link location" or "Copy shortcut". Then paste that somewhere you can read it, and you'll notice that it's not a direct link to that website. It is, for all intents and purposes, a tracking link.
So when you click it, you get sent to the target website - and likewise, when you click back in your web browser, your browser takes you back to that tracking link - which then brings you back to the SERPs.

By measuring clicks through that tracking link, in both directions, Google can easily determine bounce rate - regardless of whether you have GA installed or not.

That is incorrect. Using this method G00gle measures the time user spends on website. Of course if this time is less than 15 seconds, G00gle may assume that user bounced back to search results.

That are all old news. Now google has some great technology to sniff you http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Safe_Browsing
Most of the browsers safe search is turned on by default. Google wont leave you alone don't worry. They will always watch you.

Internet Explorer doesn't use it, I'm not sure about last versions.
 
Hi,

This thread is very helpfull, i was going to create a new thread to ask the questions but I found this one so here is my question:

Can Google see / know my website bounce rate if I dont use Google Webmaster and Google Analytics on my website ? If i dont have any of their links and my website is not connected to thoses tools will they still be able to see my website bounce rate ?

And if they are able to do it, how are they doing it without the help of the tools ?

Thanks.
 
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