Did You Just Kick Away Your Site Visitor For Money?

Posted by Jozzua on Feb 25, 2008 in Uncategorized | 4 comments

I’ve noticed some common elements of spam blogs:

1. These are usually Search Engine Optimized.
2. These have tons and tons of ads and are designed to ‘forward’ the visitor to another site for money.
3. The site owners don’t really seem to care too much about forwarding visitors to the ads.

In essence, the website owners ‘bounce’ off their site visitors as soon as they can cause they prefer the money over the site visitor.

What is a ‘bounce’?

On Wikipedia:

A Bounce occurs when a website visitor leaves a page or a site without visiting any other pages before a certain session timeout elapses. There is no standard minimum or maximum time limit a visitor must leave by in order for a bounce to occur. Rather, this is determined by the session timeout of the analytics tracking software. A commonly used session timeout value is 30 minutes. In this case, if a visitor views a page and leaves his browser idle for 31 minutes, they will register as a “Bounce”. If they then continue to navigate after this delay, a new session will occur and the last page they view before exiting or timing out again will result in another “Bounce”. Thus, it is important to note the dependency between bounces and sessions.

Just think about this:

A visitor comes to your web page, takes one look at it and then just leaves. He/She didn’t even bother to look at your other pages. How often do they just leave?

Is Your Website Designed To Make Quick Money?

For those who prefer to earn a whole lot of online money, high bounce rates are okey as long as they clicked on an Adsense Ad. If your site is designed that way, then you won’t really care about the bounce rate. Some might even consider it ‘referral income’.

For the rest of the people who are interested in getting ‘repeat’ visitors, the bounce rate is important. It’s like getting a customer and not really taking care of him/her. High bounce rates indicate that you generally hand your site visitor to somebody else.

Wouldn’t You Rather Keep A Website Visitor?

Lower bounce rates indicate that you are keeping your visitors engaged in your site. You give them information. You give them something of value. If they actually liked what you gave them, they’ll remember you and probably come back, right?

So the question for website owners and bloggers is, would you rather they come back or stay longer on the site, or would you just kick them off to the nearest advertisement? Heck, it’s the internet right? You are referring them to something that’s probably relevant to them, right?

How Does Your Website Visitor Feel About All You Bouncing Them Away?

Personally, I hate spam blogs. I often feel tricked into visiting the site. I don’t like clicking on Ads. I generally don’t like going back to websites which are all just designed for money-generation through Ads. Don’t get me wrong, Advertisements are a fact of internet life. JUST DON’T OVERDO IT!

How do YOU feel when you get to SPAM blogs?

The Spam Blog owners probably think they are doing it for a noble cause. They optimize their site and give you what they think is the relevant information for you – which is the Ad they’d prefer you click on.

Perhaps they are right. Perhaps they are wrong. What’s your take on it?