Bounce Rates - How would you deal with this scenario?

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Greetings!

I actually don't have a definitive answer to this so wish to throw it out to the community for thoughts and feedback.

I have a client who we shall call "Site 1", but they also have a job board, we shall call "Site 2".

A product of their own success, they have a high bounce rate with visitors landing on Site 1, seeing a job they want to apply for and bouncing straight off to Site 2.

The problem is that this is resulting in Google seeing some of these pages as having bounce rates of 80% to 100%, based on this formula:

Bounce rate = total number of visits viewing only one page / total number of visits

Now, I hate anything black hat or grey hat so wish to know how you would deal with this...

1. If the results from Site 2 were displayed in a new framed page on Site 1, would this still be classed as a bounce?
2. If when they click on a job on Site 1, they were taken to an intermediate page on Site 1 saying "Thank you, you are being redirected to your chosen job" for 5 seconds before being taken to Site 2, would this be classed as a bounce?
3. Perhaps the job they wish to apply for 'pulled' from Site 2 and actually displayed in a new page on Site 1 would be a better way to go?

I think that option 1 might work, sure that number 3 would but not so sure about number 2, but look forward to your comments and thoughts.

Regards,

Andy

[KeriMorgret]

Hi! We're going through some of the older unanswered questions and seeing if people still have questions or if they've gone ahead and implemented something and have any lessons to share with us. Can you give an update, or mark your question as answered? I'm interested to find out what you did here, and the effects it had.

Thanks!

[Andy.Drinkwater]

I did wonder the same myself but with so many sources talking about bounce rates, I thought it prudent to err on the side of caution.

Doing nothing is not really an option as I never leave things to chance (and this has worked in my favour more times than I care to remember in the past).

I am leaning towards my 3rd option of pulling part of the registration process back into "Site 1" so a click on a job, will keep you within the primary site for a second page.

[baptisteplace]

I don't think you would trick Google with these kind of hacks. Google Analytics bounce will not be used by Google if they use bounce rate for ranking. If this was the case you could just add an event on the page load and the bounce rate would go to 0%.

I would suggest to do nothing or to think about a different way to present the 2 sites.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Thanks MaryAnne,

Sorry, I omitted to add that this is being done for the purposes of the Google Panda update as there are mutterings that a high bounce rate could also be taken into account. No-one really knows if this is true or not, but if it is, what percentage of this will be taken into account - call it a damage limitation exercise.

It can be a pretty fast bounce sometimes if there are only a few jobs for them to look at on Site 1.

Regards,

Andy

[MaryAnneG]

Is it a fast bounce or do they spend some time on the page first? Sounds like perfectly normal behavior the way things are - do you have reason to believe that the bounce rate is actually harming them? Or is sending traffic to site #2 affecting your conversions in some way? If not, I'd be inclined to leave as-is.

Should be easy enough to test any of your scenarios...

#1 shouldn't be a bounce if part of the contents of the page are pulled from the other site, but the target url itself is on site 1.

#2  I'm inclined to think this would work, but would the 5" wait annoy your visitors?

#3 Definitely would work.