Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Will redirecting poor traffic web pages increase web presence
-
A number of pages on my site have low traffic metrics. I intend to redirect poor performing pages to the most appropriate page with high traffic.
Example
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-greyshoes
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-greenshoes
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-redshoesall of the above will be redirected to the following page:
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/high-traffic-blackshoesQuestion
Will carrying out htaccess redirects from the above example influence to web positioning of both www.sampledomomain.co.uk/high-traffic-blackshoes and www.sampledomomain.co.ukRegards Mark
-
Hi Mark,
I would say that there will be negligible results in redirecting these pages unless they happen to have a high number of good inbound links from other sources. Redirecting the individual pages alone is unlikely to make a huge difference to the authority / strength / rankings of the high-traffic pages you redirect to or the domain itself.
If you were to do this, I would do it with usability in mind. Do people arriving on the low traffic pages regularly bounce? Do you believe that they would be more likely to convert if they arrived on the high traffic page? I am not a CRO expert so would stop short of making CRO testing advice.
The one SEO benefit I can think of would be if those low-traffic pages are contributing to any duplicate content issues on your site and redirecting them would count as "cleaning up" the site. This is definitely not for sure, so I'd still stick with the mindset that you'd be doing this for the purpose of directing traffic, not search engines.
I hope this helps.
Jane
-
No problem my friend and thanks for the information.
I still do not favor the idea of redirecting the low traffic pages to the high traffic ones.
Instead of doing it, you can run a banner kind of thing that apprises the visitors on the low traffic pages about the products (the pages that receive high traffic) that drive most of the traffic. Display a message with a link to the high traffic pages prominently so that they can access those pages from the low traffic pages themselves.Something like, "You might want to check out our all time bestseller or hot product". You can add a button or some kind of call to action when clicked upon will take the visitor to the page that you want to.
Redirecting bunch of pages will bring down the size of the website in the search engine index and you don't want that to happen.
Please feel free to write post back Mark.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi.
-
Dear Devanur,
Thank you for your response.
To date i have checked both Google Analytics, Keyword Planner, and live running Google Adwords Campaign. All have not yielded favourable traffic. Please bear in mind the low traffic examples stated previously have no bearing to my actual low traffic pages. However, I have seen almost 99.5% of customers hitting my high traffic page.
With this in mind, I cannot see any way that even to incentivise customers (based on your model) that any additional traffic can be found.
Therefore, would redirecting my low traffic pages still be beneficial?
Regards Mark
-
Agree with Chris. Redirecting low traffic pages to their high traffic counterparts is not a solution here for all the reasons mentioned by Chris. First of all, please do a thorough keyword research to find out if there is sizeable search volume for the keywords/phrases that are being targeted by the low traffic pages. It is quite possible that the phrase, 'black shoes' has higher search volume than any other colored shoes and that is the reason for that page to attract and drive good traffic.
Let me quote a situation here that we faced in the past. We had two products, one with a healthy search volume from local geography and the other had very low search volume. Except in few ways, the second product was as good as the first one. So we decided to create market for it as it lacked one here. We threw some freebies and ran a contest on our website and on social media platforms. This not only created awareness about the second product but also increased sales dramatically. Slowly, over a period of time, the search volumes for this product shot up which made us jumping with joy. Though this situation does not directly relate to your issue at hand, but just wanted to convey that, because something does not convert well, we should not drop our efforts to create more and more awareness about the product. Sometimes, adding in few extras with it might change the game for you. Just my two cents.
Wish you good luck my friend.
Best,
Devanur Rafi
-
Thank you Chris you your response.
The example provided was an over simplified scenario.
In reality, I will be driving the users to a high traffic page that has relevance. Additionally, users would seldom search for the low traffic pages and therefore by removing these from Google's index won't make them appear in the search. Within the high traffic page, I will give the user the experience and information on all low traffic content.
Please give your thoughts.
Regards Mark
-
if a user wants green shoes and goes to
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-greenshoes
but in fact then gets a page about black shoes what do you think they will do ?
I would think they would bounce and then turn your high traffic page to a low traffic page. It may make more sense to not try to trick users into going to pages, Google doesn't like tricks either.
If in doubt ignore SEO and look at it from a user point of view as that's what Google wants, it wants the best for a user. if you go to a site and you're redirected all over the place it doesn't make for a pleasant experience.
In Short, redirecting pages won't help in a longer term for SEO, making a good site for user experience with good content will help. Look at other ways to promote those pages, e.g make a review of a product on the page etc.
Hope that helps a bit.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Would You Redirect a Page if the Parent Page was Redirected?
Hi everyone! Let's use this as an example URL: https://www.example.com/marvel/avengers/hulk/ We have done a 301 redirect for the "Avengers" page to another page on the site. Sibling pages of the "Hulk" page live off "marvel" now (ex: /marvel/thor/ and /marvel/iron-man/). Is there any benefit in doing a 301 for the "Hulk" page to live at /marvel/hulk/ like it's sibling pages? Is there any harm long-term in leaving the "Hulk" page under a permanently redirected page? Thank you! Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | amag0 -
Is it good or bad to add noindex for empty pages, which will get content dynamically after some days
We have followers, following, friends, etc pages for each user who creates account on our website. so when new user sign up, he may have 0 followers, 0 following and 0 friends, but over period of time he can get those lists go up. we have different pages for followers, following and friends which are allowed for google to index. When user don't have any followers/following/friends, those pages looks empty and we get issue of duplicate content and description too short. so is it better that we add noindex for those pages temporarily and remove noindex tag when there are at least 2 or more people on those pages. What are side effects of adding noindex when there is no data on those page or benefits of it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | swapnil120 -
Can noindexed pages accrue page authority?
My company's site has a large set of pages (tens of thousands) that have very thin or no content. They typically target a single low-competition keyword (and typically rank very well), but the pages have a very high bounce rate and are definitely hurting our domain's overall rankings via Panda (quality ranking). I'm planning on recommending we noindexed these pages temporarily, and reindex each page as resources are able to fill in content. My question is whether an individual page will be able to accrue any page authority for that target term while noindexed. We DO want to rank for all those terms, just not until we have the content to back it up. However, we're in a pretty competitive space up against domains that have been around a lot longer and have higher domain authorities. Like I said, these pages rank well right now, even with thin content. The worry is if we noindex them while we slowly build out content, will our competitors get the edge on those terms (with their subpar but continually available content)? Do you think Google will give us any credit for having had the page all along, just not always indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | THandorf0 -
Location Pages On Website vs Landing pages
We have been having a terrible time in the local search results for 20 + locations. I have Places set up and all, but we decided to create location pages on our sites for each location - brief description and content optimized for our main service. The path would be something like .com/location/example. One option that has came up in question is to create landing pages / "mini websites" that would probably be location-example.url.com. I believe that the latter option, mini sites for each location, would be a bad idea as those kinds of tactics were once spammy in the past. What are are your thoughts and and resources so I can convince my team on the best practice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KJ-Rodgers0 -
Merging Sites: Will redirecting the old homepage to an internal page on the new site cause issues?
I've ended up with two sites which have similar content (but not duplicate) and target similar keywords, rather than trying to maintain two sites I would like to merge the sites together. The old site is more of a traditional niche site and targets a particular set of keywords on its homepage, the new site is more of an authority site with a magazine type homepage and targets the same set of keywords from an internal page. My question is: Should I redirect the old site's homepage to the relevant internal page on the new website...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lara_dar
...or should I redirect the old site's homepage to the new site's homepage? (the old site's homepage backlinks are a mixture of partial match keyword anchor text, naked URLs and branded anchor text) I am in two minds (a & b!) (a) Redirecting to the internal page would be great for ranking as there are some decent backlinks and the content is similar (b) But usually when you do a 301 redirect the homepage usually directs to the new homepage and some of the old site's links are related to the domain rather than the keyword (e.g. http://www.site.com) and some people will be looking for the site's homepage. What do you think? Your help is much appreciated (and hope this makes sense...!)0 -
301 doesn't redirect a page that ends in %20, and others being appended with ?q=
I have a product page that ends /product-name**%20** that I'm trying to redirect in this way: Redirect 301 /products/product-name%20 http://www.site.com/products/product-name And it doesn't redirect at all. The others, those with %20, are being redirected to a url hybrid of old and new: http://www.site.com/products/product-name**?q=old-url** I'm using Drupal CMS, and it may be creating rules that counter my entries.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brocberry0 -
Are there any negative effects to using a 301 redirect from a page to another internal page?
For example, from http://www.dog.com/toys to http://www.dog.com/chew-toys. In my situation, the main purpose of the 301 redirect is to replace the page with a new internal page that has a better optimized URL. This will be executed across multiple pages (about 20). None of these pages hold any search rankings but do carry a decent amount of page authority.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Visually0 -
301 - should I redirect entire domain or page for page?
Hi, We recently enabled a 301 on our domain from our old website to our new website. On the advice of fellow mozzer's we copied the old site exactly to the new domain, then did the 301 so that the sites are identical. Question is, should we be doing the 301 as a whole domain redirect, i.e. www.oldsite.com is now > www.newsite.com, or individually setting each page, i.e. www.oldsite.com/page1 is now www.newsite.com/page1 etc for each page in our site? Remembering that both old and new sites (for now) are identical copies. Also we set the 301 about 5 days ago and have verified its working but haven't seen a single change in rank either from the old site or new - is this because Google hasn't likely re-indexed yet? Thanks, Anthony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grenadi0