Bounce Rate should not affect our Search Engine Rankings

I know this a bit controversy topic where everyone accepts that bounce rate will affect our search engine rankings. But my argument is, it should not affect the search engine rankings. Let me justify my points.

Bounce Rate Definition: “The percentage of web site visitors who arrive at a web site entry page, then leave without going any deeper into the site”

So if a visitor leaving the web page where he entered will be count as bounce rate. Get into the following scenarios,

Scenario I

For the keyword “Google Penalty Recovery”, this blog is ranking number one in Google search results. Following is the analytics report of visitors from the keyword “Google Penalty Recovery”

1) This keyword has sent 8 visitors to my website for a day.
2) 50% Bounce Rate – 4 visitors from this keyword has left the blog from this page itself with out going deep.
3) Visitor’s from this keyword average time on site is 4 minutes 34 seconds
4) Total average time on site is 1 minute 53 seconds

Analysis

50% Bounce Rate – I am having 50% bounce rate for the visitors from the keyword “Google Penalty Recovery”. With this, can I tell the page hasn’t contained right information regarding Google Penalty Recovery?

Average time on site – This is the real metric we have to take care from analytics report. Fortunately, each visitor from this keyword has spent 4.34 minutes in that page.
From this we can say that the web page contains right information and the user has enjoyed their stay more than 4 minutes in that page.

The visitor who wants to read about Google Penalty Recovery reach the webpage through the keyword “Google Penalty Recovery” in Google. He got all the information about that topic in that page itself and with that satisfaction, he is leaving that website. What harm in it?

Conclusion

As you know, we can classify the website theme into following types 1) Service Oriented 2) E-Commerce 3) Information provider

Bounce rate should not be factor to measure the website usability for information providing sites. But I too accept that it’s a real metric for the other two types of websites.

“Average time on site” will be a good metric and will applicable for the all the cases. Instead of bounce rate, SEs should have this metric to decide the keyword positions.

SE’s algorithm is always mystery and it might contain some restriction about bounce rate factor for information providing sites and blogs.