To what extent do pages with an exceptionally high bounce rate affect search engine ranking overall?

There are four things that cause high bounce rates 1) The wrong people are coming to the webpage, and when they realize that they leave. 2) The right people are coming to the website, but they don't immediately see what they want so they leave. 3) There is a technical problem with the website. Server overloaded. Pages not displaying properly. Long load times. DNS problems. 4) The right people are coming to the website and the find what they want and leave. This is typical of a price page. They were looking for the price of a new XYZ, they see what it is and so they leave. They weren't interested in buying the just want to see what the price was. Bounce rate can be a very valuable indicator to know the user satisfaction of a page. But we have to use it in context. What is the page that were watching the bounce rate on? A website that shows the current gasoline prices for major city has a high bounce rate. People come there, they see the prices,  they don't need to scroll, they just leave. They found that they wanted. Now in this case, Google can detect this. Yes it was a bounce, however these people did not return to the search results, they did not search on other websites, so they must have found what they wanted. In that case high bounce rate does not hurt the website results from Google. A high bounce rate on a homepage is probably one of the first three. Now what is a high bounce rate? Because we have to compare it to the industry. Again we have to use context. What are the other pages in the industry experiencing as a bounce rate? If all of them have high numbers, again it will not affect the websites overall Google results. Google uses many factors besides bounce rate, and in conjunction with bounce rate. Bounce rate is really the most effective for us. It's a tool that we can use to determine which pages people like and which ones they don't like. It's a way for us to see whether the changes we are making are improving the website or not. As a standalone number, it's really not that valuable. We have to take it in context with other factors. I hope that helps answer your question.

One of Bing's spokespeople said that they don't use bounce rate per se, but they do look at how many people click on a result, click back to the SERPs and/or do a similar search. Even so, I think that is a minor factor. I've never seen any evidence to suggest that this or bounce rate is a major factor in most situations. Definitely work to keep bounce rate down, but don't obsess over it. If you have pages that you believe are no use to searchers, then you might noindex those pages. Hard to say for sure without seeing the pages.

Bounce Rate has not been completely proven to be a factor in the ranking of websites... it just hasn't. There has been suspicion of this for awhile, but no study that has been done by any SEO has ever utilized enough data to prove it either way and Google has never confirmed it. Mostly because, who says a high bounce rate is a bad thing?  What if you have a single page site and it only takes a short time to read it?  What if you're a content site (like a news site) and people only read the article they came for? Bounce Rate is a useful metric, but only if used properly and within the context of the situation.  That said, I wouldn't noindex any page of quality content simply because of a high bounce rate. Good luck.

If a page has a high bounce rate, then the page is not fulfilling the need of the website visitor. This essentially means that the user intent behind the search terms or social-media teasers that bring people to the page is not adequately fulfilled by the information or product or service that the page is about. Try to discern what such visitors are trying to find, and then make the page the best one on the Internet that gives them what they're looking for. Do not no-index. Pages such as legal information, contact information, and such (if I'm guessing correctly) are often signals to Google that you are a reputable business or website. Rather, place calls to action on such pages that push people to convert in whatever manner you wish -- e-mail signups, contact forms, and so on.

Noindex and Disallow: /page-or-section/ are best used when there is an actual problem that impacts user experience or Google's inferred opinion of your relevancy to a set of queries. Despite rhetoric about correlation and causation, there is such a thing in our industry called common sense. Matt Cutts has used the term "search experiences" on more than one occasion, suggesting that Google may indeed be testing CTR and returns to results to refine the query or to choose another result.  Whether this helps or hurts SEO is irrelevant if we're talking about actions and providing value to visitors. If I know that the majority of users are immediately exiting back to where they came from, I failed and will need review my page's content, layout, conversion elements, device and browser compatibility, viewport tag, etc. As already suggested in this thread, improving the content is a great start. Sometimes regaining lost search rank can happen faster if you start with a new URL and content that doesn't have a negative history. You'll have decide if you want to 301 the old page or use a rel="canonical" or just kill it and submit a URL removal request after updating internal links and HTML/XML sitemaps. Don't keep bad content on your website, it doesn't benefit anyone or any engine. A noindex might as well be the virtual "under the bed" where you sweep stuff you're too lazy to pick up. Don't be that guy. Be the guy who keeps a clean house everyone wants to visit.

Bounce rate is a critically important and highly weighted ranking factor. Google's job is to deliver great results. If they determine that people click your website, only to quickly return back to the search results and settle for another website... that is a very bad signal. That being said, I would definitely NOT noindex high bounce rate pages. All websites have un-ideal landing pages, this is expected. Consider putting high converting buttons on the sidebar, or optimizing the general page layout. Pages with low bounce rate will, unfortunately, rank lower in the SERPs. However, when you noindex them... they won't rank at all. Fewer rankings is better than no rankings. Do not no-index them.