If you’re operating an information site you may be being unfairly penalized by Google. Google attempts to and does a pretty good job at getting quality sites to the top of its search engine result pages (serp). However, in order to do so they must make some assumptions about the metrics for sites. One of these assumptions is that the quality of a content on a site is partially determined by the number of pages any one visitor visits during one session on the site. They call this Depth of Visit. Conversely they assume that when someone comes to a site and “bounces” meaning leaves after visiting a single page, that this is an indicator of a low quality experience for a visitor.

So lets examine that assumption and see where it goes wrong. First of all here is what Google says about Depth of Visit. It “is a measure of visit quality. A large number of high pageviews per visit suggest that visitors interact extensively with your site. ” Obviously if an in depth visit is a good thing than bouncing is a bag thing, or is it.

Bounce Rate: One thing that this could indicate is that your visitors aren’t finding what they want (this is Google’s assumption) and here is where it makes sense. If you’re site is an e-commerce site and someone lands on a product page and leaves before visiting your shopping cart page, that is pretty clearly a negative for you and maybe for the visitor who didn’t find what they wanted. However if you are providing information, such as what is necessary to qualify for a tax exemption in an enterprise zone, and a person comes to your page is able to determine that she doesn’t qualify and leaves your site, your site may have done exactly the job needed and the person may be a satisfied user. This happens all the time on information sites.

What to do? Well you could break up your content so that visitors only get half of what they need before they are forced to click page 2. We see this a lot on news sites, though there the reason is to force you to read more ads. No, far better is to make sure that all your other search engine optimization is done well, so that this doesn’t become the overriding factor in how Google ranks your site.

At the same time, Google should check its assumptions which  may be based too much on the commercial side of the Internet.