OPT - Other People's Traffic

[Boomie]

Due to our name and url, we get a decent amount of direct traffic from people searching for other information. We are Boomerang, and we offer email marketing services to small businesses. As you can imagine, we get people typing in Email Marketing Solutions - Boomerang.com looking for actual boomerangs. We also get kids looking for the boomerang channel from the Cartoon Network. But most of the useless traffic comes from South America by people looking for Bumeran.com which is a popular job search site.

I've been reading lately that Google is potentially penalizing you for your website's bounce rate. These people are on our site for a second, find it not in Spanish and not useful, and go away - thus driving up our bounce rate.

I'm wondering - from an SEO standpoint - is it better to have the traffic and a high bounce rate, or to not have the traffic? I can't say we would actually do this, but would it help to block traffic from regions or Network locations? Would having a link on our site to their destination not count as a bounce? Any other suggestions or advice are appreciated.

[Boomie]

The link in the first paragraph should simply just be our url, not a description. Seems like this forum somehow grabbed our title tag. Sorry - I can't seem to edit the post.

[SemAdvance]

Its a shame you had not thought of the ramifications of using a commonly used word as your brand.


Yes Google looks at the bounce rate of visitors to your site in determining rankings. Google is nothing more than a recommendation service and they want to recommend high quality sites for their visitors and a part of this would be visitor response so to speak......(Note: what Google wants & does are two different things)

Think of it as a food critic.

If a restaurants patrons were to walk in, be turned off for some reason, and then leave, most food critics would not recommend the spot as a great place to eat.

Ergo bounce rate could be a deciding factor in which sites serve their visitors best.

Might be time to re-brand as drastic as that sounds. I think boomerang would mean the email returns to you which is not what most people would want anyway......

Blocking visitors may help but with Xmas coming search for the real boomerang will only spike and could hurt you more than help!

[claybutler]

I seriously doubt bounce rate will have a measurable effect on your rankings. Think about this scenarios. A bunch of bots from a variety of ever changing IP's continually click through then leave,thus driving down the rankings of your site. Too easy to use as a weapon therefor I doubt it carries much weight.

BTW: Bommerang .com is an awesome name. It's evocative and fits well conceptually with your product. Good job. Don't rebrand. That would be a huge mistake.

Don't worry about the confused visitors. They'll figure it out eventually.

[advancedmerchant]

I agree with Claybutler.. Don't change your name, it is really perfect. Not many sites get such a descriptive URL!

See if these other sites have Adwords PPC on Google.. you could put a small "Are you looking for?" box with the top 2 Google PPC Adsense results in there and make some cash on the redirection of the bounces to these other "Boomerang" sites.

[lchrzan]

I'd throw out this idea - why not try to sell that traffic via a partnership with a company that offers the product, or via affiliate marketing?

[kevinper]

I have a site with a high bounce rate. People are there to download a program or read about one and leave. Many come from other sites to the download link. I remain #1 on Google for my search engine phrase that I have the site optimized for.

I love your domain name. I wouldn't change it. Maybe you can actually find a way to make some income off of these people.

[kruser]

I don't know about bounce rate but..

If I opened a store for t-shirts and people came in all day long looking for ice cream... I would sell ice cream.

[SemAdvance]

Rebranding works many large corporations have done it and still do.

CP&L and Florida Power officially re-branded Progress Energy as of Jan. 1

FT.com / India / Companies - Virgin rebranded as Absolute Radio

[mbangel]

OK, just my two cents for what it's worth...

If the traffic you described is hitting your site and then wandering off, I don't see that as a problem. "Direct traffic" as you say - people who type in a url to get to your site - are not using google (or any other search engine), and therefore would have absolutely no affect whatsoever on google rankings.

If your seo is good, (relevant keywords, concise description) then google is ranking you for your keywords, and the people who find you using search engines are finding you by your keywords, and staying on your site according to how well you have chosen your keywords. These are the ones who affect your google rank.

Now if yer seo sucks, and these people are searching for boomerangs, the boomerang show, or boomeran, and find your site through a search engine, then you should be penalized for bad seo.

So "direct traffic" of the sort you describe is not a penalty to your rankings. It seems to me to be bonus advertising. It may affect your bottom line in the way of extra bandwidth, but it seems a cheap price to pay for the people who will "discover" your service on accident by typing in the wrong url.

Shame on all you people telling this person to drop their site, you just want the url for yourselves. I thought you people knew something about seo, and if you don't, keep yer opinion out of it.