[Justine]

Originally Posted by imported_silkroad

I disagree that a high bounce rate is "danger will robinson"....

The nature of your traffic is a big factor. If your forum gets millions of referrals per month from search engine traffic, then you will have a very high bounce rate.

Forums with little search referral traffic (or little traffic in general) will have lower bounce rates.

So, to make a general statement without any context that a high bounce rate is "bad" is wrong, very wrong.

a high bounce rate is BAD regardless of where your traffic is coming from

when it's high you need to look at individual pages - see what's wrong
- if your index bounce rate is high something is wrong

a lot of secondary pages (ie. page 2, 3, 4, 5, etc) can have a negative affect on bounce rate (comments usually don't offer any "good" content - not much can be done about this)