Should I delete a page that gets search traffic, that I don't care about?
-
I have a page on my site that consistently gets traffic, every month. Googlers seems to love it.
But I don't like it at all.
Webmaster tools shows that google allows us a certain number of search impressions each day. - it flatlines, they are limiting the impressions we get.
We also getthe same number of clickthroughs each day.
So my question is for anyone who has this same experience, who may have experimented by deleting a page you don't care about. Did you just lose that number of clicks each day or did other pages on your site get displayed and clicked through instead?
-
Good idea, but the problem is the searchers, not the page.
So what I did was add more stuff for those visitors to see and do.
Looks like it is working. Bounce rate is down, time on page is up.
-
Interesting - yeah, it possible that if you're getting tons of visitors who immediately bounce, and that's a large chunk of your traffic, it could actually cause harm. Unfortunately, it's really tough to tell if a 301 or similar solution would be better than a 404 without understanding the specific situation.
I'm also not clear on how the ads factor in or on what attracted this traffic in the first place. If it really is bad traffic all around and the page has no inbound links, a 404 should be ok. I just hesitate to give definitive advice, because this stuff can get very situational.
-
Sorry for the delay responding. Having internet problems after moving house.
The visitors mostly come from google, probably looking for steamy pictures.
- when they don't find them, they go away - fast, according to analytics.
So maybe google is penalizing us for having that old press release?
It could be better if they never sent us those visitors in the first place.
So I think there is little point in redirecting, because then they definitely wouldn't get what they wanted. - And I'm not going to add the type of info or pictures they are really looking for.
But these responses made me think more about it.
I'm trying two experiments.
1. Changed the ads - stopped google doing personal matches, rather giving the content a better chance to match the ads.
2. Added links in a sidebar, to 6 other items on the site that are related. Hoping this will at least lower the bounce rate.
-
There's no limit on search impressions - there are limits on the number of pages Google may be willing to crawl, and more indexed pages can drag down your ranking power for other pages, but you can have all the Google traffic you want, theoretically.
The biggest issue is that you could be losing decent visitors and you could lose the strength of inbound links if you cut this page off. If there's a more relevant page, then you could 301-redirect (as Ennovation) suggested, but it depends on the situation.
Why don't you like the page? Is it irrelevant to your site, or just not a great page (and one you'd like to update)? Are these visitors worthless, in a broader, conversion sense, or are they just not being driven to action well? There's a lot you could do to channel these visitors better, depending on the situation, but cutting them off cold is just throwing away a potentially valuable resource, IMO.
-
Maybe consider 301 redirect to a similar page on your website (similar content)
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
-
Google Analytics not Working on all pages despite many attempts
Hey gang, So this problem has been going on for months. None of our landing pages track, but all of our blog pages do. I've tried GA plugins, (we are on wordpress) and just now even put the code in the theme header script. Still to no avail. I just checked right now, and the blog pages have the global GA code, but now I noticed not even the home page has the code! Could it be something to do with my theme? I tried to pay a guy on upwork to fix but he couldn't fix it either. Thank you for you help!
Reporting & Analytics | | Meier0 -
Traffic drops considerable at midnight
Hi can any one tell me why traffic drops at the same time each day, at around midnight until 8.30 am website traffic drops off. We target the UK and the USA, we have geo target set for the UK in webmaster. Thanks for your help
Reporting & Analytics | | Taiger0 -
Adwords start Organic traffic SIGNIFICANTLY drops
I hope someone can give me some insight here, or at least point me in the right direction. As of September 1 we are running Adwords. We are seeing an alarming drop in our organic traffic since then. It's almost like Adwords is cannibalizing organic. August/September Paid 116/847 Organic 648/178 We've looked at why the Organic could have dropped (penalties, site function issues, etc.) and have found nothing unusual. Can someone give me a reason why this might be happening, Why such a dramatic decrease just as adwords is started. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | Britewave0 -
Getting google impressions for a site not in the index...
Hi all Wondering if i could pick the brains of those wise than myself... my client has an https website with tons of pages indexed and all ranking well, however somehow they managed to also set their server up so that non https versions of the pages were getting indexed and thus we had the same page indexed twice in the engine but on slightly different urls (it uses a cms so all the internal links are relative too). The non https is mainly used as a dev testing environment. Upon seeing this we did a google remove request in WMT, and added noindex in the robots and that saw the index pages drop over night. See image 1. However, the site still appears to getting return for a couple of 100 searches a day! The main site gets about 25,000 impressions so it's way down but i'm puzzled as to how a site which has been blocked can appear for that many searches and if we are still liable for duplicate content issues. Any thoughts are most welcome. Sorry, I am unable to share the site name i'm afraid. Client is very strict on this. Thanks, Carl image1.png
Reporting & Analytics | | carl_daedricdigital0 -
Deleted Rarely Visited Pages - Traffic Dropped (Big Time)
Hi folks: I'd appreciate any thoughts you might have on a problem I am having with organic traffic. One of our sites has about 500 pages/blog posts. We had about 200 pages that no one was visiting, or only one to ten people had visited in an entire year. As a result, we decided to experiment, and delete any page which had fewer than 5 visits in a year. This resulted in a deletion of about 90 pages.We did this on April 6 or 7 of this year. Two days later, we had a substantial drop in visits to the site. We had been getting about 300 sessions a day. Now, we are lucky to get that in a month. I know there was an algorithm update in late March, but our traffic dropped about two weeks after that, and a day or so after the deletion of the pages. There is a clear demarcation on analytics. I gave it a month, the traffic did not recover, so we decided to restore the pages. Traffic has not recovered and it has been about 3 months now. Does anyone have any thoughts on why we might have experienced such a drastic drop as well as what we might do to recover from it? Thanks very much
Reporting & Analytics | | jnfere0 -
Does traffic coming from Adwords increase overall Domain Authority or Page Rank?
If I'm setting up an Adwords campaign, will setting my homepage as the landing page boost my domain rank? and will the Page Rank of the landing page get boosted because of the high click rate coming from the Adwords campaign?
Reporting & Analytics | | s2bkevin0 -
Difference between page/domain authority
could anyone explain the difference between Page Authority and Domain Authoity to me or give me a link to a site where it is explained? Sorry if It's really obvious and I'm just too stupid to find out, but I've searched and haven't found anything.
Reporting & Analytics | | mtueckcr0 -
Tracking pages in two separate analytics accounts
Hi All, I'm trying to track some pages on one website in two separate Google Analytics accounts. Has anybody done this before that could help with the tracking code? Thanks in advance, Elias
Reporting & Analytics | | A_Q0