[Here’s an odd one for you. I’ve always heard that the bounce rate being tracked in Google Analytics can hurt your search engine rankings. I don’t know this for a fact, but here is my experience. I recently had a site ranked number one on Google for a pretty competitive term. Then it got slapped down to number 6! It had a conspicuously high bounce rate. We’re talking around 70 percent. Still not sure why as I have put the best content I could think of on the site. Anyways, the site was struggling to restore its original ranking, and then I decided to remove Google analytics since I can’t seem to fix my bounce rate. I really was never sure whether there was any credence to this theory. It’s sad that this wasn’t the only thing I was doing with my site at the time either, otherwise, I could’ve figured out exactly whether or not this works. Either way, I’m staying away from Google analytics from now on. Those snoops at Google can eat it. I want my ranking and I don’t need Google poking around my site for data other than my links and my content!]
A conclusion is generally considered invalid if it cannot be reliably repeated. Since you have not even attempted to repeat the circumstances that led to your suggested theory it should be considered untested and highly speculative.
I do believe that Google looks at user behavior, and your bounce rate as reported by GA, while useful for you, wouldn’t be as useful for Google. They already have the ability to track bounces back to the SERP without the aid of GA and it’s only that bounce back that would be meaningful to Google.
They don’t need your GA data to tell them that a user returned to the SERP after less than 6 seconds of clicking a listing. And if a user found exactly what they were looking for, on the exact page they landed on from a SERP listing, it would be normal to expect a high bounce rate for that page.
A bounce rate without understanding the design and purpose of a page or a website and TOS (Time on Site) along with other things, isn’t meant to Google. However, if you return to the SERP within 2 seconds, that would be a strong indicator that you did not find what you were searching for. Google already has the data they need without peeking at your GA data.
