In general, a “bounce” is described as a single-page visit to your site. In Analytics, a bounce is calculated specifically as a session that triggers only a single GIF request, such as when a user comes to a single page on your website and then exits without causing any other request to the Analytics server for that session. However, if you implement Event Tracking for your site, you might notice a change in bounce rate metrics for those pages where Event Tracking is present. This is because Event Tracking, like page tracking is classified as an interaction request.

Of course having read through several SEO related posts identifying bounce rate as a ranking factor (or at a minimum a quality signal), I devised a way to game it.

<div id="header" onMouseOver="pageTracker._trackEvent('bounce', 'bouncecheck', 'Look Ma No Bounce');">

I figure a mouseover on my header will probably be triggered enough to dramatically drop my bounce rate without looking too artificially manipulated. Plus I wonder if a body onLoad statement would be overkill, or trigger faster than the gif request. Anyway after implementing this for one day you can see the huge difference below.

Now while my method is obviously solely aimed at gaming the system, there are some legitimate uses. A few examples that come to mind where firing off an event make sense are video plays, if the end of a javascripted animation, newsletter signups, rss subscribes and there are probably a thousand more.

Luckily we have a new tool at our disposal to set things straight with some level of reliability – the link canonical tag. According to Google:

If your site has identical or vastly similar content that’s accessible through multiple URLs, this format provides you with more control over the URL returned in search results. It also helps to make sure that properties such as link popularity are consolidated to your preferred version.

Let’s assume three split test variant pages:

• index.php
• indexb.php
• indexc.php

To properly point each page to the original you would simply place this tag in the HEAD statement of each page:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.domain.com/index.php">

What about other search engines you say? Well luckily Yahoo! and Bing announced support for the link canonical tag at the same time as Google. YMMV with these second-tier search engines – but at least they have stated their intent to honor it.

A second level of protection can be added by adding a meta tag to each page to prevent indexation. I would recommend a setting of NOINDEX, FOLLOW as seen below:

<meta name="robots" content="NOINDEX, FOLLOW" >

Obviously this method is ONLY going to work if you are split testing and not multivariate testing.

NOTE: I am not in any way affiliated with seobook or Aaron Wall. (Aaron if you’d like me to take this down send me a note – Ryan)

xml for search engine:

<OpenSearchDescription>
<ShortName>seobook keyword research</ShortName>
<Description>seobook keyword research
</Description>
<Image height="16" width="16" type="image/x-icon">http://seobook.com/favicon.ico</Image>
<Url type="text/html" method="get" template="http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/?Keyword={searchTerms}"/>
</OpenSearchDescription>

To install this script just click the down arrow on your search engine bar in firefox and select “seobook keyword research”. Big thanks to Aaron Wall for creating such a useful tool.

Files

• connect.php – stores credentials for mysql connection
• add-domains.php – allows you to add a domain into the database. This domain is then presented as an option on the index page.
• add-keywords.php – checks a domain (already inserted via add-domains.php) against a keyword. If a match is found it inserts the data into the database.
• index.php – displays all of your domains
• final.php – the actual keyword rankings page. Allows you to update rankings and see each domain’s keyword rankings on one page.
• style.css – some css styling
• postjax2.php – processes serp results and stores values in the db
• keyword_rankings.sql – database scheme – load this query via phpmyadmin to setup your mysql db
• header.php – some navigation
• ajaxproxy.php – some cross domain proxy I found to allow you to get rankings from multiple ip addresses

Google doesn’t particularly like it’s serps scraped – sometimes they will return garbage data if they suspect you are doing it. To get around this, we must bounce our requests off of multiple IP addresses. If you have a few cheap hosting accounts lying around, upload the postajax.php script to a folder accessible from the webserver. Insert your urls where these files can be found into the following section of code:

   var csurla = 'http://YOUR_URL_HERE/postjax2.php';
   var csurlb = 'http://YOUR_URL_HERE/postjax2.php';
   function cointoss(wot){
         var d= new Date().getSeconds();
         wot=(wot)? wot: [csurla, csurlb];
         d+= Math.round(Math.random()*10);
         return wot[d%2];
         }

The above example randomly chooses one of two urls to post the data to. This code could easily be changed to accommodate as many urls as you have access to. The next segment of script gathers the data from each table cell in a row of data. We then serialize the data and post it to to our ajax proxy which gets around the pesky cross domain ajax restriction. the $.Ajax command that is built in to jQuery then waits for the php proxy script to respond and then inserts the resulting data into the row we just clicked:

$(".update").click(function() {
       /* extract all the info out of the table cells */
       var selectR = $(this);
       var urlsearch = $(".urlse a").html();
       var se = $(selectR).find("td.se").html();
       var wt = $(selectR).find("td.wt").html();
       var str = $(selectR).find("td.keywords a").html();
       var ranking = $(selectR).find("td.rankingspan").html();
       var orank = $(selectR).find("td.orank").html();
       var delta = $(selectR).find("td.hclass div").html();
       var clicks = $('#tabler').find("td.clickstotal").html();
       var wttotal = $('#tabler').find("td.wttotal").html();
       var keysearch = str.replace('/%20', '+');
       var csurl = cointoss();
       var dataString = 'csurl=' + csurl + '&clicks=' + clicks + '&wttotal=' + wttotal + '&domain=' + urlsearch + '&keyword=' + keysearch + '&wt=' + wt + '&se=' + se + '&rank=' + ranking + '&orank=' + orank + '&delta=' + delta;
       $(this).html("<td colspan='9' align='center'><img src='http://PATH_TO/loading.gif'></td>");

          $.ajax({
          type: "POST",
          url: "http://PATH_TO/ajaxproxy.php",
          data: dataString,
          cache: false,
          success: function(data){
          $(selectR).html(data);
          var totalr = 0;
          var tempint = 0;
          $("td.clicks").each(function(){
          if($(this).text().length > 0){
           var tempint = parseFloat($(this).text());
           totalr += tempint;
           }})
          $("#clickstotal").html(totalr);

       $("td.wt").each(function(){
       if($(this).text().length > 0){
           var tempwt = parseFloat($(this).text()); //convert to number
           totalwt += tempwt;
           totalwt = totalwt.toFixed(2);
           }})
          }
          });
      });

Therefore, because I’d like to see more accountability on all sides of this debate and because I’m tired of people who don’t understand statistics and because I’d like to make some money, I issue the following challenge.

Hello? Illegal gambling? Silver is undaunted:

For each day that the high temperature in your hometown is at least 1 degree Fahrenheit above average, as listed by Weather Underground, you owe me $25. For each day that it is at least 1 degree Fahrenheit below average, I owe you $25.

So on one hand Silver is upset because climate skeptics (according to him) don’t understand statistics and the concept of anecdotal evidence – and then proceeds to make a bet over short term temperatures – the exact anecdotal evidence he is railing about. Regardless of the outcome you can be sure of one thing: This bet will not dissuade true believers, who will brush it off as anecdotal evidence if they lose and claim an urgent need to act if they win. You can not bet against a group of people who move the goalposts (global warming->climate change) when data doesn’t conform to their belief system. As a result you would have to be an idiot to bet Nate Silver.

UPDATE – Its worth mentioning that the average temperature over the date range Silver provided (June 21-July 18) is 70.5 ° F while historically it is 71.96 ° F according to data from weather.com.