All Entries Tagged With: "google"

Why Your Site’s Bounce Rate Is Important For Rankings

Blogs are at a disadvantage in one regard: Traditionally, they have high bounce rates. That’s because readers generally read one post and they’re gone. This is especially true of subscribers.

But that may not matter in the long run even though bounce rates are important for ranking purposes. This isn’t proven, but I believe it’s true. Google has stated publicly that they measure traffic and rank websites based on traffic. But a high traffic site may not necessarily be of any value any more than a low traffic site with a low bounce rate. All things considered, a high traffic site with a high bounce rate may actually be holding a negative, not a positive.

Consider this: A site receives 100,000 daily visitors on a regular basis. 80% of those visitors are unique and 80% of those read one page and they’re gone, never to return. Would you want that? Or would you prefer to have 1,000 daily visitors of which 80% are loyal and return on a regular basis? I think we’d all rather have the latter, right?

Particularly if your site is a blog. You want readers coming back.

A loyal readership is much more valuable than high numbers of people that show up and leave. But I do believe that your site’s bounce rate may be an indicator of user value in the eyes of at least one search engine. Work on creating valuable content and your bounce rate will go down. You might even see a resulting increase in search ranking for some of your keywords.

Will Bing Change Search Habits?

Microsoft’s Bing has received a lot of buzz this week after coming out of the starting gate. But will that buzz hold on long term?

WebProNews reported this morning that Bing has moved up to No. 2 in search market share, surpassing Yahoo! who has had that spot for several years now. After playing around a little bit with Bing myself this week I’ve noticed several really useful features that give it a real edge over Yahoo! and in some cases over Google. But it remains to be seen whether the search engine will sustain that over the long term. I believe the initial spike in usage is due to mass curiosity in the marketplace. But will users continue to use Bing long term? I think it’s doubtful.

There are several reasons why I don’t think Bing will catch on long term. For starters, there is a huge Google fan base. Googlers will not abandon Google just because Bing is pretty and helpful. While Bing has managed to make a good point that Google’s keyword-based search is failing in some areas, which it is, where Google is strong it is really strong. None of Bing’s strengths have proven themselves over time whereas Google’s has.

Unless Yahoo! can fix its failings, it is likely that Bing will maneuver itself into the No. 2 spot permanently, but I don’t see it overtake Google any time soon. What about you?

Will Google Introduce Real-Time Search?

It’s been rumored for awhile. Twitter will knock down Google. Google will buy Twitter. The two will marry and live happily ever after. Yada yada yada

OK, let’s get real. Loic Le Meur, founder and CEO of Seesmic, asked Larry Page what he thought about real-time search. The Page said he thought it was a good idea. Actually, it something like, “Yeah, I know, Twitter’s kicking our ass, but I need to look good so I’m going to say we’ve always needed it and now those pogues down in future product development are agreeing with me now that they see Twitter kicking our asses.”

Or something along those lines any way.

So the big question is, will Google develop a real-time search engine? Will it use semantic technology? How will its ranking algorithms be structured? Will domain age go away? Will blogs benefit?

Stay tuned. More to come.

Is Twitter A Blogger’s Best Friend?

Should you be on Twitter? Should you have a Twitter account? I think you should. But there are other reasons to use Twitter. Even if you aren’t a Twitterer yourself, you can use Twitter as a blogger to help you come up with topics to write about. This ability plus the use of Twitter to promote your blog posts is a very powerful combination.

CNET recently reported that Twitter Search is adding the ability to crawl links, making Twitter Search an actual real-time search engine. That means in addition to finding the latest tweets on a given topic you can also find the latest blog posts and other information published online by conducting a Twitter Search. While I wouldn’t abandon Google just yet, this does add a level of competition between Twitter and Google. In terms of real-time search, Twitter wins.

Of course, Twitter hasn’t officially announced the availability of this technology or started allowing users to search the entire Internet. But when it does then every blogger would benefit by using Twitter to promote their blog posts. Twitter will likely the the way that future searchers use to find information right now, the most recently published information, on a topic of interest. And you’ll want to be there.