Pogo Sticking: what it is and why it is an SEO issue

Open Google, launch a query, take a look at the SERP, click one result, and then, dissatisfied with the information found on the landing page, quickly go back to the results page and choose a second result, and eventually repeat the process. What we have described can occur frequently when we use Google, but we may not know that this phenomenon of jumping back and forth between results has a name, namely pogo sticking, and can be an SEO problem as it is a symptom of uninteresting content with little focus on the topic sought by users.

What is pogo sticking

In Anglo-Saxon culture, the pogo stick is the classic trampoline stick that kept kids entertained in decades past, and its traditional bouncing operation led to the baptism of this SEO phenomenon.

Pogo sticking is in fact the behavior of a user hopping between sites positioned in SERPs until he or she finds the content he or she actually wants, rapidly navigating back and forth between pages of Google search results. According to some theories, pogo sticking occurs when the user navigates back to search results within the first five seconds of viewing the page.

In SEO terms, pogo sticking is a symptom of a page on a site that ranks well on Google but generates poor quality traffic and is seen as unhelpful by users. In practice, the kind of hopping behavior of users is a direct result of immediate dissatisfaction in search results, and thus pogo sticking is always bad news for the site experiencing it, but also for Google itself (which in fact uses the search journey to improve the quality of the answers provided).

The attention of users and readers is a valuable commodity online, and indeed one of our primary goals is to capture and maintain it; to do so, we must first understand exactly how people interact with the content we offer online, and analysis of this phenomenon can provide us with some useful insights to direct our strategies toward more interesting and engaging resources.

Understanding pogo sticking, the hopping between SERPs and results

In the real world, an example of pogo sticking might be a customer who walks into a store, takes a quick look, and then leaves because they can’t find what they are looking for. The store might have a wide variety of products, but if it fails to meet his or her immediate needs, that single person will leave, probably never to return. Similarly, a website needs to be able to meet the user’s needs quickly, otherwise it risks missing the opportunity it had and (potentially) progressively losing visibility on Google.

Going back to online, there are several reasons why users might pogo sticking: the page might not be relevant to the search query, or worse it might not be user-friendly or have poorly written content, or it might simply be of little interest to the person.

A standard case of pogo sticking occurs if we are looking for a recipe for a chocolate cake: we click on the result that seems most “inviting” among those offered by Google, but instead of finding the recipe, we come across a long article on the history of chocolate. Disappointed, we go back and try the next link, which gives us what we were looking for. This is an example of pogo sticking. The original site did not meet our immediate expectations, so we went back to the search results to look elsewhere.

So pogo sticking is a phenomenon that affects us all, both as users and as marketers: understanding how it works and how to avoid it can make the difference between a successful website and one that is lost in the vastness of the web, because in the digital world, user satisfaction is one of the keys and levers to success.

The difference between pogo sticking and bounce rate

At first glance, pogo sticking would seem to resemble bounce rate, but in fact there are substantial differences.

As we know, the bounce rate represents “the percentage of visitors who visit a single page on a website” and then end their interaction with that site.Its ideal value depends on the type of site, and a high bounce rate is not always negative, as it can also mean that the visitor has completed his or her journey by getting full response to the question and need that were driving his or her online interest, without the need to go deeper into the site.

In contrast, pogo sticking is always negative, because it is a symptom of the user’s dissatisfaction with the results provided by Google and, more specifically, their correspondence to his initial question, the query he launched on the search engine.

The difference then lies in the fact that by analyzing the bounce rate we find out how many users arrive at the website, spend some time on the page, do not move on