Time on Site vs Bounce Rate Question
-
If you follow my questions here on SEOMoz, you know that we have quite a few issues with a particular site. http://bit.ly/RE8V2a
Our bounce rate was over 85% for quite some time. We changed the site template and the Bounce Rate has dropped to around 5%, but the Time on Site has dropped dramatically. We were just over two minutes, now we're averaging 1:34.
But here's the thing, time spent on the Home Page is averaging 24 seconds! What would you take away from this?
Thanks so much!
-
Thank you!!
-
Looks like your plugins settings need to be adjusted to remove GA tracking like Yoast and SEO Plus.
-
Thanks for the responses! So I basically need to run through all of the files to see where Google Analytics is and why there are so many occurrences of it. Ok, thanks again!
Any ideas on where to look? I only have access to the WP template files, where I only see it once in the Footer.php.
-
As the others mentioned, its probably a coding mistake. 5% bounce rate is phenomenal.
In addition, 24 seconds on homepage can be good or bad - depends on what the next action is (do visitors go further into the site, or leave?)
When working with a new template, I like to install something like ClickTale or Inspectlet (user mouse tracking code) so see exactly how users react to the new design. We use that (along with aggregated data from GA) to develop a better visitor flow - improving time on site and getting visitors where you want them to go.
-
When I relaunched our website I noticed our bounce rate had dropped dramatically. After inspection, it was exactly what Irving said - multiple calls to your GA script. This fires the script several times, confusing the heck out of it, and really screwing up your data.
Remove the multiple GA scripts and you'll be fine!
-
You have three separate instance of GA analytics code on your home page. Your stats are probably all messed up. Here's my two cents. Take a few hours and read through your page source on your page templates and flag anything you see as questionable and make sure your code is clean. Sounds a little harsh but this is probably your best route for accuracy.
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
-
Thoughts on archiving content on an event site?
I have a few sites that are used exclusively to promote live events (ex. tradeshows, conference, etc). In most cases these sites content fewer than 100 pages and include information for the upcoming event with links to register. Some time after the event has ended, we would redesign the site and start promoting next years event...essentially starting over with a new site (same domain). We understand the value that many of these past event pages have for users who are looking for info from the past event and we're looking for advice on how best to archive this content to preserve for SEO. We tend to use concise urls for pages on these sites. Ex. www.event.com/agenda or www.event.com/speakers. What are your thoughts on archiving the content from these pages so we can reuse the url with content for the new event? My first thought is to put these pages into an archive, like www.event.com/2015/speakers. Is there a better way to do this to preserve the SEO value of this content?
On-Page Optimization | | accessintel0 -
Does no-follow for pages affect site ranking?
Hey, I have a question. On my site, it's divided into the main site and the blog is in a subfolder of same domain. Within the main site (same domain), there are MANY checkout pages and other internal pages we use though all with "NO FOLLOW" on each. Despite it having "NO FOLLOW", will it affect our blog rankings in any way or domain ranking?"
On-Page Optimization | | Mirian0 -
New site pages are indexed but not ranking for anything
I just built this site for a client http://primedraftarchitecture.com. It went live 3 weeks ago and the pages are getting indexed as per Webmaster Tools. But I'm not seeing it rank for anything. We're adding blog articles regularly and used Moz Local for local links and have been building links in other local directories (probably about 15 so far). Usually I get some rankings, although very low, after just a week or two for new sites. Does anyone see anything glaring that may be causing a problem?
On-Page Optimization | | DonaldS1 -
Author snippet image in results, question!
Hi, Quick question really, I can see how a Google+ profile picture showing up in the results can increase CTR and even trust but would this be a no no for a normal website? I mean if you had a website which offered personal training, so a brand rather than an individual would you not use this snippet? I've seen some website, even ecommerce sites using this tag to just increase their CTR.
On-Page Optimization | | Bondara0 -
Spanish version of site - best practice?
I need to create a Spanish version of an existing site. My idea was to have the Spanish content switch out the English content if the query string had something like ?l=es. It would also drop a cookie so that all other pages would switch out content as well. I do want the Spanish content to be indexed and rank in the search engines, though. I would include all of the Spanish versions (with the ?l=es) in the site map and link to them on every page with a link to the Spanish version. Does anyone have any experience with this? Is this a bad idea? Thanks! Tom
On-Page Optimization | | TomBristol0 -
Site Cleanup Operation
Hi, I hope you can help, I have been asked to look at a friends site that is simply shocking, but somehow ranks for its main target keywords, mainly because they are easy. But going through the site he has like 350 links on his menus that are all follow so I need to change them to nofollow, but should anything else normally be marked such as no index etc on a menu link. Also upon doing a Moz scan there are something like 250 missing meta descriptions from old blog posts. When I looked closer they had been using the blog section for posting relevant news headlines, but thats it, So he has 250 useless, low quality blog posts. My question is, what should I really do with them, ie delete, redirect, canonical etc. Any help is much appreciated. Thanks Paul
On-Page Optimization | | propertyhunter0 -
Does Archive pages help in indexation of the site?
Hello, we have an argue internally regarding if we should keep the archive pages on a news site or not. Pro Archive pages help indexation of the news. although not all of us are sure about this. Con archive pages receive from none to little traffic archive pages are source of duplicate content, duplicate titles - which we can manage some how but does it worth? What is your opinion on this topic, should we keep it or not? thanks, Irina
On-Page Optimization | | InformMedia0 -
Large Site - Advice on Subdomaining
I have a large news site - over 1 million pages (have already deleted 1.5 million) Google buries many of our pages, I'm ready to try subdomaining http://bit.ly/dczF5y There are two types of content - news from our contributors, and press releases. We have had contracts with the big press release companies going back to 2004/5. They push releases to us by FTP or we pull from their server. These are then processed and published. It has taken me almost 18 months, but I have found and deleted or fixed all the duplicates I can find. There are now two duplicate checking systems in place. One runs at the time the release comes in and handles most of them. The other one runs every night after midnight and finds a few, which are then handled manually. This helps fine-tune the real-time checker. Businesses often link to their release on the site because they like us. Sometimes google likes this, sometimes not. The news we process is reviews by 1,2 or 3 editors before publishing. Some of the stories are 100% unique to us. Some are from contributors who also contribute to other news sites. Our search traffic is down by 80%. This has almost destroyed us, but I don't give up easily. As I said, I've done a lot of projects to try to fix this. Not one of them has done any good, so there is something google doesn't like and I haven't yet worked it out. A lot of people have looked and given me their ideas, and I've tried them - zero effect. Here is an interesting and possibly important piece of information: Most of our pages are "buried" by google. If I dear, even for a headline, even if it is unique to us, quite often the page containing that will not appear in the SERP. The front page may show up, an index page may show up, another strong page pay show up, if that headline is in the top 10 stories for the day, but the page itself may not show up at all - UNTIL I go to the end of the results and redo the search with the "duplicates" included. Then it will usually show up, on the front page, often in position #2 or #3 According to google, there are no manual actions against us. There are also no notices in WMT that say there is a problem that we haven't fixed. You may tell me just delete all of the PRs - but those are there for business readers, as they always have been. Google supposedly wants us to build websites for readers, which we have always done, What they really mean is - build it the way we want you to do it, because we know best. What really peeves me is that there are other sites, that they consistently rank above us, that have all the same content as us, and seem to be 100% aggregators, with ads, with nothing really redeeming them as being different, so this is (I think) inconsistent, confusing and it doesn't help me work out what to do next. Another thing we have is about 7,000+ US military stories, all the way back to 2005. We were one of the few news sites supporting the troops when it wasn't fashionable to do so. They were emailing the stories to us directly, most with photos. We published every one of them, and we still do. I'm not going to throw them under the bus, no matter what happens. There were some duplicates, some due to screwups because we had multiple editors who didn't see that a story was already published. Also at one time, a system code race condition - entirely my fault, I am the programmer as well as the editor-in-chief. I believe I have fixed them all with redirects. I haven't sent in a reconsideration for 14 months, since they said "No manual spam actions found" - I don't see any point, unless you know something I don't. So, having exhausted all of the things I can think of, I'm down to my last two ideas. 1. Split all of the PRs off into subdomains (I'm ready to pull the trigger later this week) 2. Do what the other sites do, that I believe create little value, which is show only a headline and snippet and some related info and link back to the original page on the PR provider website. (I really don't want to do this) 3. Give up on the PRs and delete them all and lose another 50% of the income, which means releasing our remaining staff and upsetting all of the companies and people who linked to us. (Or find them all and rewrite them as stories - tens of thousands of them) and also throw all our alliances under the bus (I really don't want to do this) There is no guarantee this is the problem, but google won't tell me, the google forums are crap, and nobody else has given me an idea that has helped. My thought is that splitting them off into subdomains will have a number of effects. 1. Take most of the syndicated content onto subdomains, so its not on the main domain. 2. Shake up the Domain Authority 3. Create a million 301 redirects. 4. Make it obvious to the crawlers what is our news and what is PRs 5. make it easier for Google News to understand Here is what I plan to do 1. redirect all PRs to their own subdomain. pn.domain.com for PRNewswire releases bw.domain.com for Businesswire releases etc 2. Fix all references so they use the new subdomain Here are my questions - and I hope you may see something I haven't considered. 1. Do you have any experience of doing this? 2. What was the result 3. Any tips? 4. Should I put PR index pages on the subdomains too? I was originally planning to keep them on the main domain, with the individual page links pointing to the actual release on the subdomain. Obviously, I want them only in one place, but there are two types of these index pages. a) all of the releases for a particular PR company - these certainly could be on the subdomain and not on the main domain b) Various category index pages - agriculture, supermarkets, mining etc These would have to stay on the main domain because they are a mixture of different PR providers. 5. Is this a bad idea? I'm almost out of ideas. Should I add a condensed list of everything I've done already? If you are still reading, thanks for hanging in.
On-Page Optimization | | loopyal0