Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • SEO Q&A
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. Javascript to manipulate Google's bounce rate and time on site?

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Javascript to manipulate Google's bounce rate and time on site?

    Technical SEO
    5
    8
    7150
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • BenRWoodard
      BenRWoodard last edited by

      I was referred to this "awesome" solution to high bounce rates.

      It is suppose to "fix" bounce rates and lower them through this simple script.  When the bounce rate goes way down then rankings dramatically increase (interesting study but not my question).

      I don't know javascript but simply adding a script to the footer and watch everything fall into place seems a bit iffy to me.

      Can someone with experience in JS help me by explaining what this script does?

      I think it manipulates the reporting it does to GA but I'm not sure.  It was supposed to be placed in the footer of the page and then sit back and watch the dollars fly in. 🙂

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • AdamThompson
        AdamThompson @wattssw last edited by

        Stephen,

        Thanks for the explanation - I just had a client ask me about this script. Based on your explanation, this script will change your bounce rate. This is because once the event is triggered, the visit will no longer be considered a bounce, even if the user only visits one page. So it's an artificial/false decrease in bounce rate, not a "fix" as others claim.

        I wrote a short blog post on this (and referenced your description)!

        ~Adam

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • BenRWoodard
          BenRWoodard @supermarketonline last edited by

          Thanks for the encouragement Martin.

          As it turns out, with the help of the two previous answers, the script is actually based on a valid script adjustment that might actually help some people in their reports but the what my client thought was that this was an easy/quick way to get more traffic.  The article they found was saying this would dramatically change results in GA and then directly effect their site's ranking in the SERPs.

          They had "proof" in the form of some GA screenshots so I needed more information on what the script actually does.  I was able to let my client know what exactly this was and recommend not doing it unless there was a problem in the GA reports that they wanted fixed. 🙂

          Thanks again for your reply.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • supermarketonline
            supermarketonline last edited by

            Dont do it - just improve your content.  You know it's wrong to try and cheat the system.  Think about what would happen if you banned from the results.

            Look i dont mean to be harsh - but i allways balance risks against rewards.   In this situation - the risk is to high.

            BenRWoodard 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • BenRWoodard
              BenRWoodard @wattssw last edited by

              Thanks for that link.

              The site (link in the previous reply) my client referred me to was manipulating the way they were reporting the results.  The closer I looked at it, I realized that it was a little spike but then it went right back down.  Knowing them they just paid a bunch of people to visit the site.

              This stuff is annoying and gives us SEO's a bad name. 😞

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • BenRWoodard
                BenRWoodard @grasshopper last edited by

                The code was from this site http://millionairevolution.com/cut-bounce-rate-by-80/ and looking at the dates and analytics shown on the page this is nothing more than a misrepresentation of the facts and data.

                I knew Google doesn't use data from GA but the data graph was showing a contradiction and I didn't know exactly what the script was doing.

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • wattssw
                  wattssw last edited by

                  First, Google Analytics reporting does not, to my knowledge, influence SERP rankings. Altering the data collected through Google Analytics should not affect SEO indicators.

                  Second, this is from here: http://briancray.com/posts/time-on-site-bounce-rate-get-the-real-numbers-in-google-analytics/

                  Once this code is installed, your site will update Google Analytics every 10 seconds under the Event Category "Time", the Event Action "Log", and the Event Value will be based on the pattern of 0:10, 0:20, 0:30, 0:40, 0:50, 1:00, 1:10, etc.

                  The script does not change your bounce rate, it just gives you additional information.

                  BenRWoodard AdamThompson 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 1
                  • grasshopper
                    grasshopper last edited by

                    You're correct that it's a GA hack.  Avoid it.

                    Google has publicly stated that they don't use your site-specific GA metrics to influence organic search rankings.  E.g., they're not taking data from your GA profile, and feeding that to the Search Quality team to determine if your site should rank better or worse.  They have MANY better ways to accurately track anonymous user interactions with sites at scale (e.g. Chrome).

                    The only thing that you'll accomplish with this code is making all of your own internal metrics turn to garbage.  Accurate metrics are important.  If you bounce rate is high, knowing that allows you to take action to improve your site and reduce it.

                    The more people who stay on your site for more than 1 pageview, the more money your business is likely to make. Improve your bounce rate to improve the profitability of your website, not for some supposed correlation between bounce rate and organic search ranking.

                    BenRWoodard 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 6
                    • 1 / 1
                    • First post
                      Last post

                    Got a burning SEO question?

                    Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                    Start my free trial


                    Browse Questions

                    Explore more categories

                    • Moz Tools

                      Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

                    • SEO Tactics

                      Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

                    • Community

                      Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

                    • Digital Marketing

                      Chat about tactics outside of SEO

                    • Research & Trends

                      Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

                    • Support

                      Connect on product support and feature requests.

                    • See all categories

                    Related Questions

                    • Smileworks_Liverpool

                      What's the best way for users to upload their images to my wordpress site to promote UGC

                      I have looked at lots of different plugins and wanted a recommendation for an easy way for patients of ours to upload pictures of them out partying and having fun and looking beautiful so future users can see the final results instead of sometimes gory or difficult to understand before and after images. I'd like to give them the opportunity to write captions (like facebook or insta posts and would offer them incentives to do so. I don't want it to be too complicated for them or have too many steps or barriers but I do want it to look nice and slick and modern. Also do you think this would have a positive impact on SEO? I was also thinking of a Q&A app where dentists could get Q&A emails and respond - i've been doing AMA sessions and they've been really successful and I would like to bring it into out site and make it native. Thanks in advance 🙂

                      Technical SEO | | Smileworks_Liverpool
                      1
                    • jgresalfi

                      If I'm using a compressed sitemap (sitemap.xml.gz) that's the URL that gets submitted to webmaster tools, correct?

                      I just want to verify that if a compressed sitemap file is being used, then the URL that gets submitted to Google, Bing, etc and the URL that's used in the robots.txt indicates that it's a compressed file. For example, "sitemap.xml.gz" -- thanks!

                      Technical SEO | | jgresalfi
                      0
                    • Editor-FabiusMaximus_Website

                      Google stopped crawling my site. Everybody is stumped.

                      This has stumped the Wordpress staff and people in the Google Webmasters forum. We are in Google News (have been for years), and so new posts are crawled immediately. On Feb 17-18 Crawl Stats dropped 85%, and new posts were no longer indexed (not appearing on News or search). Data highlighter attempts return "This URL could not be found in Google's index." No manual actions by Google. No changes to the website; no custom CSS. No Site Errors or new URL errors. No sitemap problems (resubmitting didn't help). We're on wordpress.com, so no odd code. We can see the robot.txt file. Other search engines can see us, as can social media websites. Older posts still index, but loss of News is a big hit. Also, I think overall Google referrals are dropping. We can Fetch the URL for a new post, and many hours later it appears on Google and News, and we can then use Data Highlighter. It's now 6 days and no recovery. Everybody is stumped. Any ideas? I just joined, so this might be the wrong venue. If so, apologies.

                      Technical SEO | | Editor-FabiusMaximus_Website
                      0
                    • bearpaw

                      How do we keep Google from treating us as if we are a recipe site rather than a product website?

                      We sell food products that, of course, can be used in recipes. As a convenience to our customer we have made a large database of recipes available. We have far more recipes than products. My concern is that Google may start viewing us as a recipe website rather than a food product website. My initial thought was to subdomain the recipes (recipe.domain.com) but that seems silly given that you aren't really leaving our website and the layout of the website doesn't change with the subdomain. Currently our URL structure is... domain.com/products/product-name.html domain.com/recipes/recipe-name.html We do rank well for our products in general searches but I want to be sure that our recipe setup isn't detrimental.

                      Technical SEO | | bearpaw
                      0
                    • melen

                      Staging site and "live" site have both been indexed by Google

                      While creating a site we forgot to password protect the staging site while it was being built.  Now that the site has been moved to the new domain, it has come to my attention that both the staging site (site.staging.com) and the "live" site (site.com) are both being indexed.  What is the best way to solve this problem?  I was thinking about adding a 301 redirect from the staging site to the live site via HTACCESS. Any recommendations?

                      Technical SEO | | melen
                      0
                    • reidsteven75

                      How Does Google's "index" find the location of pages in the "page directory" to return?

                      This is my understanding of how Google's search works, and I am unsure about one thing in specific: Google continuously crawls websites and stores each page it finds (let's call it "page directory") Google's "page directory" is a cache so it isn't the "live" version of the page Google has separate storage called "the index" which contains all the keywords searched.  These keywords in "the index" point to the pages in the "page directory" that contain the same keywords. When someone searches a keyword, that keyword is accessed in the "index" and returns all relevant pages in the "page directory" These returned pages are given ranks based on the algorithm The one part I'm unsure of is how Google's "index" knows the location of relevant pages in the "page directory".  The keyword entries in the "index" point to the "page directory" somehow. I'm thinking each page has a url in the "page directory", and the entries in the "index" contain these urls.   Since Google's "page directory" is a cache, would the urls be the same as the live website (and would the keywords in the "index" point to these urls)? For example if webpage is found at wwww.website.com/page1, would the "page directory" store this page under that url in Google's cache? The reason I want to discuss this is to know the effects of changing a pages url by understanding how the search process works better.

                      Technical SEO | | reidsteven75
                      0
                    • inlinear

                      Are Collapsible DIV's SEO-Friendly?

                      When I have a long article about a single topic with sub-topics I can make it user friendlier when I limit the text and hide text just showing the next headlines, by using expandable-collapsible div's. My doubt is if Google is really able to read onclick textlinks (with javaScript) or if it could be "seen" as hidden text? I think I read in the SEOmoz Users Guide, that all javaScript "manipulated" contend will not be crawled. So from SEOmoz's Point of View I should better make use of old school named anchors and a side-navigation to jump to the sub-topics? (I had a similar question in my post before, but I did not use the perfect terms to describe what I really wanted. Also my text is not too long (<1000 Words) that I should use pagination with rel="next" and rel="prev" attributes.) THANKS for every answer 🙂

                      Technical SEO | | inlinear
                      0
                    • travelocitysearch

                      Google.ca is showing our US site instead of our Canada Site

                      When our Canadian users who search on google.ca for our brand (e.g. Travelocity, Travelocity hotels, etc.), the first few results our from our US site (travelocity.com) rather than our Canadian site (travelocity.ca). In Google Webmaster Tools, we've adjusted the geotargeting settings to focus on the appropriate locale, but the wrong country TLD is still coming up at the top via google.ca. What's the best way to ensure our Canadian site comes up instead of the US site on google.ca? Thanks, Tory Smith
                      Travelocity

                      Technical SEO | | travelocitysearch
                      0

                    Get started with Moz Pro!

                    Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                    Start my free trial
                    Products
                    • Moz Pro
                    • Moz Local
                    • Moz API
                    • Moz Data
                    • STAT
                    • Product Updates
                    Moz Solutions
                    • SMB Solutions
                    • Agency Solutions
                    • Enterprise Solutions
                    Free SEO Tools
                    • Domain Authority Checker
                    • Link Explorer
                    • Keyword Explorer
                    • Competitive Research
                    • Brand Authority Checker
                    • Local Citation Checker
                    • MozBar Extension
                    • MozCast
                    Resources
                    • Blog
                    • SEO Learning Center
                    • Help Hub
                    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                    • How-to Guides
                    • Moz Academy
                    • API Docs
                    About Moz
                    • About
                    • Team
                    • Careers
                    • Contact
                    Why Moz
                    • Case Studies
                    • Testimonials
                    Get Involved
                    • Become an Affiliate
                    • MozCon
                    • Webinars
                    • Practical Marketer Series
                    • MozPod
                    Connect with us

                    Contact the Help team

                    Join our newsletter
                    Moz logo
                    © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                    • Accessibility
                    • Terms of Use
                    • Privacy

                    Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.