Google News Bug
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During today and yesterday we are getting a lot of visits (Over 400) from http://news.google.com the visits are all at the same time and to different pages, the visits are very brief so much so that it pushes our bounce rate up to 69% in GA. Is there anything we can do to stop this?
Thank you in advance?
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I agree with Linda. Google Search and Google News are two different things with two different user types. High bounce rates are more common with people scanning headlines and skimming articles. I've never heard of a site popping into Google News causing a Google Search penalty.
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If that is your only issue, then it is unlikely that this will result in any penalty.
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Thank you for your response, my only worry is do you get penalised if you have a high bounce rate, this is the 3rd day in succession we have had a lot of visits from Google news.
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Traffic from Google news can tend to have a high bounce rate--many of the people who come to your site don't know you but are attracted by the headline and sometimes they find the page is not what they expect.
You can block the Google news crawler from certain pages that you think might result in a high bounce rate but you probably don't need to bother--as Ryan said, that does not sound like a lot of visits...
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Ryan
Thank you. It looks like all of the visits have come from Google.
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You should be able to see the google news page in more detail within Analytics by clicking through to it's details. That referrer should still have your article on it, well a blurb of your article.
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Ryan
Thank you for your reply. I am not sure how to find which article if any has been indexed on Google news?
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Have you identified what exact article is sending traffic to you via Google News? It sounds like a portion of your site was picked up as news worthy. 400 daily visits isn't a lot for a large number of sites and is typical of getting a page or site to go viral.
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