High bounce rates from content articles influencing our rankings for rest of site

[seozachz]

We have a large content article section on our e-commerce site that receives a lot of visits but also have very high bounce rates.  We are wondering if this is hurting the rest of our site's rankings.

**When I say bounce rates I mean what ever metrics Google is using to determine quality content (specifically after the Panda update). **

We are trying to determine if having the content articles on our domain hurts us.  We only have the content articles for link building.

[TheEspresseo]

Does bounce rate affect your rankings? Here's an oldie but goodie: http://me-in-seo.blogspot.com/2009/02/does-bounce-rate-affect-sites-google.html

How can you lower your bounce rate: http://searchengineland.com/two-simple-rules-for-fixing-high-bounce-rate-pages-35125

What happened with Google's Panda update? http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-farmer-update-analysis-of-winners-vs-losers

Note that Chrome collects direct user feedback on bounces. After you hit "back" from a SERP result it lets you block that site. No doubt doing so signals spam to the algo.