Can visitors duration time affect Google Rankings?

[hfranz]

Does the time a person stays on a website affect Search Rankings? If so, could the lower time from Adwords Visitors be effecting organic rankings? And the same for bounce rate.

If

Non-Paid Search Traffic Avg. Visit Duration time is 3:55

and

Paid Search Traffic Avg. Visit Duration is 1:59

Could the low duration time be affecting our website rankings?

[Syed1]

It could. It shouldn't weigh in heavily as 'time on site' does not always equate to quality of page or even the relevancy of the page. Some pages are more useful when short and the 'action' perhaps does not consume a lot of time but I assume Google looks at industry or "website type" averages, sets benchmarks and considers accordingly. This is what I 'think' - not something successfully tested and proven.

[Matthew_Edgar]

Like Syed1 said, it could but probably not much. In light of Panda changes though, this is probably a metric they will start using to measure quality.

There was a blog post on SEOmoz a month ago that quoted Bing saying that they do pay attention to what they call "dwell time". http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-2-user-metrics-that-matter-for-seo The part about about dwell time was about half way down and here is the link from that blog post to what Bing had to say: http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2011/08/02/how-to-build-quality-content.aspx

[OlgaG]

That's a great question!

The thing is, there are websites that naturally have high bounce rates and low avg. visit duration time.

One example is Wikipedia: people google "what year did  Titanic sink", get their answer and quit without visiting other pages. Can we say that high bounce rate or low avg. visit duration time negatively affects Wikipedia's rankings? No way!

I think the algorithm Google applies is more complex. The search engine might stereotype the web and assume that in case of insurance websites, for example, visit duration >N and bounce rate