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
-
Same spam traffic coming from two different sources
This week we did two big email sends from completely separate sources and separate lists. However, in GA I see spam traffic coming from the same city and the same service provider when I look at the report for each source. Screenshots attached. I'm hoping someone can help me understand what I'm looking at and what I should do in the future to prevent. Thanks! g9NTZ5z X5WhYnf
Reporting & Analytics | | eGInnovations0 -
How does Google Maps/G+ traffic show up in Analytics?
Hi Moz Community, I've been trying to figure out how traffic from Google Maps (and G+) shows up in Google Analytics and am struggling to find a good answer online. If someone finds a business through Google Maps and then clicks on the website in the Maps listing, does that show up as a referral from Google Maps? Our site shows virtually zero traffic from Google Maps even though we have a number of listing. Two related questions: if someone clicks through to a G+ page from a Maps result and then visits our website from the G+ page, does that show up in Analytics as a referral from G+? Is traffic from Google Maps or G+ ALSO counted as organic traffic? (Would it be possible to accidentally double-count a visit as both organic and a referral from Maps/G+? Thanks everybody!
Reporting & Analytics | | JohnGroves0 -
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 -
301 Redirect 'https'? First post - Newbie.
Good afternoon, Thank you in advance for your help - this is my first post and I am new to all of this. Situation: I've setup 301 redirects for www.thechiplab.com to my new site www.chiplab.com (recently launched e-commerce site on Magento) through cPanel. Problem: Some of my best links are to my old ''https:" www.thechiplab.com secure domain (ex. http://techcrunch.com/2006/12/22/why-doesnt-cafepress-use-flash/) and are not being "passed" on to the new domain. (Open Site Explorer) Is it possible to recover any of the PR from the old secure site? Thanks again, Chase
Reporting & Analytics | | chiplab0 -
Amazon.com inc.increase in direct traffic
Hi All, I have seen a increase of direct traffic from hostname amazon.com inc. This only happened on one day. Any ideas what/why it is? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Sayers0 -
Google's New Privacy Policy and Analytics
Does anybody know if Google's new privacy policy allows it to use data gathered by Analytics to be used as a ranking factor in the SERPs?
Reporting & Analytics | | Jolora0 -
Google Analytics internal Site Search - Destination pages dispaly Search results
Hi, Im having a bit of an issue with Google Analytics internal site search, I am able to currently track the search terms through my website internal search but when I click onto destination pages I just get the search result page. When clicking destination pages I would expect to get the pages on which the user ended up after the results page, instead I just get the results page which is pretty much useless ?submitsearchXXXXXX hope you can help, look forward to your response. Thanks,
Reporting & Analytics | | Tug-Agency1 -
List all URL's indexed by google
Hi all i need a list of all urls google has indexed from my site i want this in excel format or csv how do i go about getting this thanks in advance
Reporting & Analytics | | Will_Craig0