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According to an independent test done by SEO Black Hat, the bounce rate of a webpage plays a considerable role in determining its rankings within the search engines Google. 

For those of you who have not heard of bounce rates.  Here is the definition that Google gives:

Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert. You can minimize bounce rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy.

Does this conclusion make sense?  Yes, I would agree that it does.  Google is all about user experience.  So why wouldn’t Google implement this little piece of algo to improve the experience of its users?  Not only does bounce rate help determine relevant sites, but it also helps to weed out some of the spam sites.

In addition to SEO, I believe that bounce rate also affects PPC performance, more specifically Quality Score.  By tracking bounce rates on each landing page, Google can assess whether or not a landing page is relevant to a given set of keywords.  So a high bounce rate would indicate that the landing page is not relevant, and therefore would receive a reduced Quality Score.