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by strict9 4404 days ago
It's too bad sites aren't also penalized for fixed-position social share widgets that make reading on mobile impossible, like wordsteam does.
2 comments

They are indirectly penalized for it. Bounce rate is a factor in google's organic search algorithm. If a lot of users click-through a given search result, find a bad experience, google has incentive (and makes an effort) to penalize those results.
Wait, how can google measure that? Do they have a tracker that sees when I leave a site?
They get direct data on click-back. (Search, click, come back to google after a very short time, is a fair signal, in aggregate, that the users don't like that site's search results or other experience factor.)

I don't believe they directly have bounce data, but they infer it from click-back. They have publicly stated that they do NOT use google analytics data to inform organic search rankings.

Yes, also full page overlays. Everytime one of these loads, I press back just on principle.