A "bounce" is when a person leaves "through" the same page they came in through. A visitor who only looks at one page. That's all. It isn't even a bad thing, necessarily. If you search for "Gone With The Wind" and find the movie on Hulu, watch the entire thing, and then leave, that's a bounce. That's also a happy visitor (
with bad taste). The only way time could have any effect on bouncing statistics, as Samantha said, is if somebody is on your site for an hour, but only sees two pages - if your stats package times out after 20 mins, that would look like a recurring visitor bouncing twice. Notice, also, that a bounce isn't
necessarily a bad thing - imagine an ecommerce site that sells you on the landing page, etc.
Here's the moral of the story, though. You read an article saying Google will punish you for having a lot of bounces. I read an article saying
the moon is a propaganda hoax, and isn't really there. Even though both of these articles were posted on the prestigious internet, both are wrong. (
That happens a lot.)
Using Analytics doesn't mean this punishment is turned on, although it's theoretically possible that it could be. (
Because then Google has enough information to make the call.) It's very much in Google's interest for more web sites to use Analytics - for the simple reason that this lets them collect more usage data. If using their stats package came with an increased risk of being punished, nobody would use it. Nevermind that selective punishments -
being able to punish 1 in ever 5 (?) sites (
or however many use Google Analytics) don't actually help them improve their search engine. It's possible that bounce rates could
usually be a proxy for quality, this isn't always the case, as we've seen, but also, delisting (
or pushing down in the SERPs) a slice of the whole because you know more about them, including their bounce rates, leaves you exposed to even higher bounce sites that don't use your stat package.
And then there are the ad blockers, some of which block Analytics code.
