Don't have "sticky" pages? You may get blocked by Google!

• When I'm doing research in Google I'll occasionally bounce-back from a site I visit and notice that Google has given me the option to block the site completely from my results. Other times I'm just presented with a Google Plus option on the site. Can you explain why this is happening?

Answer: What you are seeing is the continued evolution by Google to determine relevancy of their search results through user experience. If you recall, earlier this year we published the following byte concerning bounce rates, site speeds, and user experience:

Google loves faster loading pages! How does your site measure up?

In this byte we emphasized this:

"More recently, as a result of the Panda update(s) from Google, there has been a greater emphasis on how site speed CAN and DOES influence bounce rate (which can cause a site to drop like a rock in Google)."

We've been telling subscribers for quite awhile that site speed AND bounce rate are super-important considerations of which site owners must be aware. Now, with the full integration of Google+ options within search results, we are seeing this become undeniable.

For example, we did some searching last month for the phrase Christmas gag gifts. We went through Google and reviewed several sites spending varying amounts of time browsing each one. On some sites we spent less than a minute, some sites several minutes, and some sites as much as 8-10 minutes. At the end of each visit we hit the back button and returned to the Google results screen to reselect another option.

The results were pretty interesting. In every case where we visited a site and spent less than two minutes browsing the page we received an added message on the listing which stated Block all www.samplesite.com results. Here's how it looked:

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