Does no-indexed page has an impact on bounce rate

[mmohammadi125]

my question is:

I have a page that contains some external links, I know when visitors click on them and leave my site it hurts my bounce rate, But I have a solution for that, I am using external link redirection code, with this code after users clicking on external links they are not leaving my site and first went to some link like this: "http://mysite.com/redirect/https://externalsite.com/"

and after 10 seconds they redirect to the external site, I make this redirect page noindex and nofollow. but the question is does this noindex page can decrease my page bounce rate because users don't leave my site and first go to another page of my site. but I don't know does no-indexed page has an impact on bounce rate or my struggle is worthless

[Roman-Delcarmen]

If the page is tagged as "No Index" that means Google will not register your page on its Index/database.

So there's no a big deal, usually ecommerce, apps, learning sites have internal pages that they to want visible to everybody, such as dashboards, internal settings.

But use the "No Index" tag has some risks
What is NoIndex / Follow and when do I need it?

The best option to prevent this issue, use the robot.txt in that way no matter what happens on that page Google will worry about it.

Example: If you use WordPress, the login page is yoursite.com/wp-admin/ Wordpress by default Wordpress keep away the crawler from this page

[mmohammadi125]

thanks for your respond Ramon but I didn't exactly get what I want! I know what is noindex and also know how to use robots.txt but I just don't know does google drop page bounce rate if we link to a noindex page? I mean does noindex page impact on bounce rate or because of it is noindex then it does not impact on bounce rate?

[ThompsonPaul]

You're ruining your site's usability for no reason, unfortunately. Google doesn't care about the bounce rate on your site as ranking factor in the example you have given (specifically because it is so trivial to manipulate as you are doing, for one reason). For many users, encountering this kind of behaviour on a site would be a major security.spam signal.

If you want to better understand your visitor behaviour on single-page visits, you'd be far better off to implement event tracking on your external links. You could even set the event to "interactive" so it would no longer register as a bounce visit if that's useful to your Analytics plan, but again, just manipulating the bounce rate does absolutely nothing for ranking purposes.

Hope that helps?

Paul

[willcritchlow]

Hi there. There are a number of ways in which this is a bad idea - as others have pointed out. But in particular:

1. What you are doing may manipulate the "bounce rate" you see in analytics, but won't affect the % of users who return immediately to the search results after landing on your page - which we know is one of the ways Google evaluates the quality of their own search results
2. Going via an interstitial page is on its own not great UX, but having a delay on that page just makes it more likely that a user will give up and leave immediately - and also have a greater chance of remembering your site as being a poor UX and be less likely to return

At an overarching level, there's nothing wrong with having external links off a page. This is normal and expected on any site.

I would say you should put all your efforts that are currently going into manipulating this behaviour and these metrics into improving the user experience of your site to make it better for the people who do find it.

I hope that helps.