AFAIK

> pogo sticking != bounce rate

Bounce rate is one page visit basically. Doesn't take in account the time spent on the site. Pogo sticking is going back and forth between search results, spending no time on the pages.

I think it's obvious why pogo sticking is bad.

@martinkhan yes that seems right. Pogo sticking is in a way subset of what is considered bounce. So when user bounces, it means he visited one page and left - nothing about time on site, while pogo sticking is kind of a quick bounce, back to the search engine, visiting another page. That's telling G that the site you pogo bounced from wasn't good enough to answer your question, or give you information you were searching for, so you have to open another.

However, what I found interesting is, that the pogo bounce rate isn't variable in G's ranking formula. Well, at least according to what John Mueller said in this video.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/asmUDAzWKdI&quot; frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Thanks. The way I read it, bounce rate isn't necessarily a bad thing. For example, if you have one page website, your visitors can't visit more than one page per visit, but they might spent a lot of time on your site anyway. Is that correct?

Being fairly new to seo, I understand that pogo sticking means bounce rate. But what is different? Does google take in account 'pogo sticking' metric for positioning their results? How can google tell if the user bounced or not if the target site doesn't use analytics or other tracking accessible by google?