(Entry was posted by James Davidso on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 07/12/2013).

Do time on site and bounce rate are affect ranking?

Quick question: I have a site which gets a lot of direct traffic from America because my brand name is the same as a big brand in the US. People type the domain in directly and then click off straight away as it`s the wrong site. My time on site and bounce rate are shocking. Is this affecting my ranking and how could I fix it? Thanks in advance.

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OUR ANSWERS

Answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Panelists.

Alistair Lattimore: Matt Cutts spoke about the impact of bounce rate on search rankings at SMX Advanced in June 2012 1 and stated that Google didn`t use it at that time. 1 http://www.webpronews.com/matt-cutts-google-doesnt-use-bounce-rate-2012-06

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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Chhetain Yholmo: Ya bounce rate is a serious issue bcoz search engines will consider your site spam. Well what type of brand or query does people do. The high bounce rate is simply showing u that ur site the kind of site they are looking for.
Neil Cassels: That is tricky. If people are typing in the URL directly and then realising they have the wrong site than the one they intended, not much you can do.
Jon Dunn: Bounce rate back to serp's is an issue, not bounce rate from a direct visit. Google does not use analytics data to establish bounce, they use their own page- the serp's.

If it was analytics bounce rate that was the problem you could just delete analytics ;)
Andrei Gherghel: Look for 'Geographic target -> target users in' in google webmaster tool and choose the desired country. You'll find this option in 'Site Settings'
steve johnson: A little more clarification +James Davidson Did you intentionally put the domain name that has very reputed brand name in US (so that you want deviate traffic from that site to your's) or you have relevant information for users to browse & engage in your site?