Yesterday I posted about the [intlink id="blazing-minds-sudden-boost-website" type="post"]increase in website traffic[/intlink] that my blog had received and how StumbleUpon had helped this increase, but after reading some of the comments made, I decided to see what effect some of the social bookmarking sites had on my blogs bounce rate.

So, I logged into my Google Analytics to find out some information on the referring sites over the past month and to see what was happening with the bounce rates.

Suffice to say I wasn’t really that surprised with the results and as you can see from below, it’s quite obvious that some of the social bookmarking websites have a problem with those that “click and run”

1. StumbleUpon – Bounce Rate = 91.89%
2. FaceBook – Bounce Rate = 85.92%
3. Digg – Bounce Rate = 62.50%

The sites which did surprise me on a lower bounce rate were:

1. Twitter – Bounce Rate = 60.50%
2. BlogEngage – Bounce Rate = 53.12%
3. BloggerLuv – Bounce Rate = 48.08%
4. Bloggers – Bounce Rate = 55.17%

I now which are the top sites that I’ll be posting my links to in the future

So don’t get caught up in posting to the big networks of social bookmarking websites, it seems that the big sites have a lot of users that just click on a link and move away from it very quickly, where as site such as BlogEngage and BloggerLuv have such a brilliant collection of friendly bloggers that appreciate the effort that goes into blogging that they stop and read for a while and even comment on a few posts in one visit, no need to mention names here as you know who you are

My overall response to all this is join a website like the four mentioned above and take part with other bloggers, it all pays of in the end as some of the other sites may indeed damage your website bounce rate.

Now this is a controversial point for a lot of bloggers and readers of blogs, the dreaded word “Toolbar“, but hang on a minute let me finish, those of you who visit my blog often will know about the Wibiya Toolbar that runs at the bottom of Blazing Minds and I have personally found that it has helped reduce my bounce rates since it was installed.

I have tried to make it match the colours of the site and it fits nicely at the bottom the blog, not bothering anybody, but for those that look a little closer at it will notice that I have some handy little featuring running on it and recently I add some of the newer features that Wibiya have added to their site for Toolbar users to use.

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