[Justine]

No. it is not. I have been over this with many sites.

Most sites that receive traffic mostly from search engine referrals (the long tail traffic) will see very high bounce rates.

This is because most users who search for content using a search engine will click on the site from, say Google, and then they will "go back" if they do not find what they need and select another site (from the search engine). This is the nature of "long tail" traffic.

Almost all sites with high volumes of traffic from search engines referrals have high bounce rates.

So, when you say (incorrectly) "all high bounce rates are bad" what you are saying is "all long-tail search engine referral traffic is bad" because you cannot high search engine traffic without having a high bounce rate.

This is a fact. I wish it was not a fact, but it is.

Forums with 95% of their traffic, which are millions of page views a month, will have high bounce rates. Sites with mostly direct traffic and referral traffic other that search engines, will have a lower bounce rate.

Folks who make blanket statements that "high bounce rate is bad" normally come from sites that have low page views and little traffic from search engine referrals. The proof is in the numbers of high volume sites with mega long-tail search referrals.

urgghhh, that's why I said "when it's high you need to look at individual pages - see what's wrong"

I guess I should have wrote a long message to make things more clearer for those who couldn't grasp the message.

I totally agree with the "long tail" traffic - this is one of the reasons why you need to start looking at individual pages (files - ie. index, showthread, forumdisplay, etc).

Large sites* with 80% traffic coming from search engines should see a "global" bounce rate of 50-65% -- anything higher than this will need tweeking. (Yes, it can be improved.)

(large sites* - 5 million+ page views per month)