In the past, not too many website owners have paid much attention to their website bounce rate, which Google defines as the percentage of visitors who only briefly view one page of any site they visit and exit without checking its other pages.

However, now that Google has given this statistic more weight and credibility, website owners now have to work to improve bounce rate on their sites, or lose money in the process. An article by Travis Harper on DrivingTraffic shows us how to improve bounce rate.

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Matt Cutts, a member of the Search Quality team for Google, recently talked about how SEO (search engine optimisation) for Google should unfold in the coming months. What he suggested is captured below in a nutshell.

• Addressing webspam much more comprehensively via Penguin 2.0 (rolled out on May 22).
• Punishing advertorials violating Google’s ethical guidelines. Web owners must provide user disclosures to suggest that their links are paid and not organic.
• Dealing sternly with traditionally spammy areas (example- pornographic queries).
• Denying spam links more forcefully, automatically making them less effective.
• Implementing complex techniques of link analysis.
• Rolling out hack site detection tools to help against hack sites and those that serve malware. Hacked sites are to be expected to communicate better with webmaster tools thus discovering what method of troubleshooting to employ.
• Punishing users working over black hat forums and spamming packages.
• Rewarding those websites which use powerful organic content.
• Rewarding authority sites over a particular niche (hospitality, travel, medicine). Google’s algorithms will rate sites with regularly updated, quality content higher thus helping users gather quality information more easily.
• Helping sites that fall in the ‘grey zone’ but have been nonetheless affected by Panda (this is subject to finding a few positive signals from them).
• Providing example URLs to webmasters in order to help them diagnose their problem better.
• Preparing better grounds for small and medium firms to compete (who were at the receiving end of Penguin 1.0)
• Working on result clusters for the same domain. If you see the same domain appearing in a cluster on the search results, you can expect to see that domain a lot less in the following pages. Moreover, Google will also look to relegate clusters as far from the top pages as possible.

You can watch the whole video here:

What do you think will be the single most effective change for SEO in coming months?

What do you do if you have been told by Google that you have “unnatural links” pointing to your site?

Matt Cutts from Google answer this question in his recent video.

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