One thing I’ve quickly come to admire about ProspectMX is the way you focus on the big picture and the long term. Rather than just keep up with tricks and hacks to boost search results, you continue to emphasis good work and overall best practices.

I’m not sold on the premise that search engines are using (or will use) bounceback data as a ranking factor. There are a lot of inherent problems with that data, so it would be a very unreliable indicator of user intent. Still, even if search engines aren’t using it as a ranking factor, the advice in the ebook is still solid advice.

Sticky SEO outlines some great strategies for making sites more usable, more useful, and more sticky. Whether or not those strategies help with ranking, they certainly help with usability, making users happy, and increasing conversions. In the long run, that may indirectly increase rankings as users vote the site up on social networks, link to the site, etc.

So the ebook is a good read, and well worth the price (grin), even IF the premise for the book is flawed (and of course the premise might be true – I’m just not sold on that part of it).

In the end they aren’t all that useful in a non-personalized environment and are considered dirty signals. Bounce rates should be more a function of good webmastering anyways…

It makes me sad to see such poorly research suppositions.. maybe I should write an ebook? Naw.. the 10 or so posts over the last year should do fine… he he….

Anyway, just my 2c as I try to break this myth before it picks up too much speed :0)

Happy new year to U and yours brother… keepin it real!!