[imported_silkroad]

Originally Posted by Justine

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

Sorry, but we don't need to grasp your message, because your message is incorrect.

If you have 5 million+ page views each month and most of your traffic is from search engine referrals, then please take a screen shot of the relevant data from Google analysts and post the images, showing your time period, page views, bounce rate and corresponding search engine referrals.

Sites with lots of direct traffic and referrals from other web pages get a much lower bounce rate than large sites with mega long-tail search engine referrals.

Frankly, Justine, I don't need a sidebar lecture on the topic (smile!), I want to see your facts :-) I do not think you have a site which gets massive search engine referrals and has a low bounce rate. All sites have the same issue. This is not theory, LOL, is this the nature of sites with massive search engine referrals.

Facts please!

PS: I have many sites with low bounce rates. They all have less traffic and a much lower percentage of search engine referrals. So, according to this poll, ROTFL, it is better to have a site with low traffic than a site with high traffic because the bounce rate is less? Not all sites are the same. You cannot make a blanket statement "low bounce is bad".... .that is why this poll is seriously flawed!

--------------- Added 24 May 2009 at 05:50 ---------------

Originally Posted by UncoderMom

11.15% New Visits
20.56% Overall
9.83% Forum index
5.79% .com page
# Direct Traffic 11,616.00 (75.65%)
#
Search Engines 2,447.00 (15.94%)
#
Referring Sites 1,289.00 (8.39%)
#
Other 3 (0.02%)

13,025 pages were viewed a total of 115,712 times

Precisely my point, thank you!

This site (above) has a relatively low monthly page view where most traffic is direct traffic. Search engine referrals only account for 16% of the traffic. Naturally, this site will have a lower bounce rate that a site with much more traffic that comes mostly from long tail search engine referrals.

--------------- Added 24 May 2009 at 05:52 ---------------

Originally Posted by Spinball

Flawed poll. We have 60.5% bounce rate . We have massive penetration into Google and vBSEO installed. The trick is to keep people once they get here. No idea how to do that at the moment.

Agreed !!

Folks who do not have massive long tail traffic do not understand this concept. If you try to lower the bounce rate, the effect is that you will lower the amount of long-tail search engine referrals.

It is very difficult to lower bounce rate on these sites. I once made a change that improved bounce rate about 8 percent, and I was happy. Folks who don't have a great deal of long tail search referrals and have mostly direct or site referrals do not grok this concept.