Javascript to manipulate Google's bounce rate and time on site?
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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.
Related Questions
-
What's the best way to handle product filter URLs?
I've been researching and can't find a clear cut answer. Imagine you have a product category page e.g. domain/jeans You've a lot of options as to how to filter the results domain/jeans?=ladies,skinny,pink,10 or domain/jeans/ladies-skinny-pink-10 or domain/jeans/ladies/skinny?=pink,10 And in this how do you handle titles, breadcrumbs etc. Is the a way you prefer to handle filters and why do you do it that way? I'm trying to make my mind up as some very big names handle this differently e.g. http://www.next.co.uk/shop/gender-women-category-jeans/colour-pink-fit-skinny-size-10r VS https://www.matalan.co.uk/womens/shop-by-category/jeans?utf8=✓&[facet_filter][meta.tertiary_category][Skinny]=on&[facet_filter][variants.meta.size][Size+10]=on&[facet_filter][meta.master_colour][Midwash]=on&[facet_filter][min_current_price][gte]=6.0&[facet_filter][min_current_price][lte]=18.0&per=36&sort=
Technical SEO | | RodneyRiley0 -
Google's ability to crawl AJAX rendered content
I would like to make a change to the way our main navigation is currently rendered on our e-commerce site. Currently, all of the content that appears when you click a navigation category is rendering on page load. This is currently a large portion of every page visit’s bandwidth and even the images are downloaded even if a user doesn’t choose to use the navigation. I’d like to change it so the content appears and is downloaded only IF the user clicks on it, I'm planning on using AJAX. As that is the case it wouldn’t not be automatically on the site(which may or may not mean Google would crawl it). As we already provide a sitemap.xml for Google I want to make sure this change would not adversely affect our SEO. As of October this year the Webmaster AJAX crawling doc. suggestions has been depreciated. While the new version does say that its crawlers are smart enough to render AJAX content, something I've tested, I'm not sure if that only applies to content injected on page load as opposed to in click like I'm planning to do.
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Google Cache can't keep up with my 403s
Hi Mozzers, I hope everyone is well. I'm having a problem with my website and 403 errors shown in Google Webmaster Tools. The problem comes because we "unpublish" one of the thousands of listings on the site every few days - this then creates a link that gives a 403. At the same time we also run some code that takes away any links to these pages. So far so good. Unfortunately Google doesn't notice that we have removed these internal links and so tries to access these pages again. This results in a 403. These errors show up in Google Webmaster Tools and when I click on "Linked From" I can verify that that there are no links to the 403 page - it's just Google's Cache being slow. My question is a) How much is this hurting me? b) Can I fix it? All suggestions welcome and thanks for any answers!
Technical SEO | | HireSpace1 -
We're no longer turning up in Google SERP for our brand search when we used to be #1 after our site update. Any ideas why?
We recently updated our website and during the push, someone mistakenly 301 redirected "www.brandx.com" to "brandx.com" instead of the otherway. Since then, our website no longer turns up for the search "brandx" on Google. We have reversed the mistake a few days ago, but we're still not turning up, and we used to rank #1 in Google SERP. Could it just be due to timing between the crawls and that our www. site didn't make it in Google's index due to this mistake? We have submitted our new sitemap to google a couple of days ago as well, as a side we're still showing up #1 in Bing's results however. And it should still show up based on SEOMoz's SERP report. Any help would help as I'm growing increasingly concerned.
Technical SEO | | JoeLin0 -
Google has not been visiting my site
Hi I am working on a site at the moment http://www.cheapflightsgatwick.com and i had the site using a different template and in the search engines for the search term cheap flights gatwick we were fourth and for the term holiday magazine we were 12th in google but now we are not even in google on the first page for the search terms. But now after changing the template in joomla our rankings have gone out of the window. It took me about a day to sort out the site with the new template so i was not expecting any problems with the search engines but for some reason there is. If you put into the search engine www.cheapflightsgatwick.com then you will see that google has not visited the site for four days and also it is not showing the description and instead it is showing details about joomla. Can anyone let me know if there is anything i need to do to sort this out and why google is taking so long to visit my site
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Can JavaScrip affect Google's index/ranking?
We have changed our website template about a month ago and since then we experienced a huge drop in rankings, especially with our home page. We kept the same url structure on entire website, pretty much the same content and the same on-page seo. We kind of knew we will have a rank drop but not that huge. We used to rank with the homepage on the top of the second page, and now we lost about 20-25 positions. What we changed is that we made a new homepage structure, more user-friendly and with much more organized information, we also have a slider presenting our main services. 80% of our content on the homepage is included inside the slideshow and 3 tabs, but all these elements are JavaScript. The content is unique and is seo optimized but when I am disabling the JavaScript, it becomes completely unavailable. Could this be the reason for the huge rank drop? I used the Webmaster Tolls' Fetch as Googlebot tool and it looks like Google reads perfectly what's inside the JavaScrip slideshow so I did not worried until now when I found this on SEOMoz: "Try to avoid ... using javascript ... since the search engines will ... not indexed them ... " One more weird thing is that although we have no duplicate content and the entire website has been cached, for a few pages (including the homepage), the picture snipet is from the old website. All main urls are the same, we removed some old ones that we don't need anymore, so we kept all the inbound links. The 301 redirects are properly set. But still, we have a huge rank drop. Also, (not sure if this important or not), the robots.txt file is disallowing some folders like: images, modules, templates... (Joomla components). We still have some html errors and warnings but way less than we had with the old website. Any advice would be much appreciated, thank you!
Technical SEO | | echo10 -
What's the best way to switch over to a new site with a different CMS?
Is it better to 301 or to closely duplicate each page URL when switching over to a new website from an established site with good ranking and a different CMS ( Drupal switching to Wordpress)?
Technical SEO | | OhYeahSteve0 -
Does Google take user site blockings from Chrome as a spam signal?
When you perform a search in Chrome, click through to a result, then hit "back", you get a nice little option to "Block all example.com results" listed next to the result from which you backed out. I am assuming Google collects this information from Chrome users whose settings allow them to? I am assuming this is a spam signal (in aggregate)? Anyone know? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | TheEspresseo0