@rabbithunter 217019 wrote:
Not trying to nit pick the post but I’ve seen content pages not even promoting their targeted keywords, which resulted in an instant “back button” click to the second serp result stay atop #1 for years for monthly 6 figure keywords. I don’t think time on site, or bounce rates apply as much as many believe.
I was saying that these are things that might be considered in the future, not that they are being used now. Both Bounce Rate and Time on Site are tough to consider due to how they are measured, eg: a user lands on your home page but doesn’t click into any sub-pages, but moves onto another site. In this instance, Google doesn’t know if you came to the page and spent 30 minutes reading it, got exactly what you needed and moved on, or if you saw the page for 1 second and got the heck out of there.
Clearly Time on Site and Bounce Rates are good indicators of a websites quality, but with Blogs for example the goal is to give a user all the information they need on a single page, so this metric would discount their value, which is why I don’t think Google is using these metrics today.