The bounce effect is not something we want, it’s something we don’t want. To sum it up, bounce is a measure of the time it takes a visitor to click on your page in the Google results, read the content, then bounce back to Google results. Google knows you, you see. It knows your IP address and session variables. These are means of tracking you as a user. If Google sees you find a page and return within seconds, it will assume that the resource served isn’t what you’re looking for. In return, this lowers the rank for the site and that given phrase. If the bounce effect is substantial enough, you’ll plummet in the results. If Google doesn’t see you in a while, it will assume you’ve either spent a lot of time reading good content or have been signposted to resourceful areas. This will increase your rank. 

The bouncing pattern

The pattern I’m referring to is the cyclic motion of the result sets. I’m seeing pages, even sites, go up and down several times a month. Currently stability is poor and questions are being asked as to why sites do well, drop, then do well again.

The theory

There’s too much SEO. Manipulation of the results is something that the search engines are driving millions into averting. Their aim is to maintain and serve quality results. They say you cannot pay to manipulate the organic listings but you can if you employ a good SEO consultant. I’m sure Google are working hard to counter this. Since there is plenty of content rich information that is optimised, I’m guessing Google is cycling the results and using the bounce effect to come to a conclusion as to the final rank of the resource.

Social networking is the best measure of quality. It’s consumers who best decide if the information served is right for them and social networks such as Digg and Del.icio.us offer a great way of determining this. It would make sense for the major search engines to emulate this voting system to judge quality. What better way than employing a bounce effect?

Final thoughts

What all this means is nothing new. We need to focus our content solely for the user but we already know that. Unfortunately, search engines aren’t that wise yet so SEO will still have a huge part to play, and to a degree, will always be with us, unless of course Google becomes a social network too.

I can’t see an end to this either, in fact, I can only see growth of the SEO industry as different but fortunately completely transparent methods are being used to judge rank. The hard part is staying on top of this and compiling a user base of statistics to back up the research, which I’m sure is time enough for Google to shift the posts yet again.