Should I delete a page that gets search traffic, that I don't care about?

[loopyal]

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?

[loopyal]

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.

[Dr-Pete]

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.

[loopyal]

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.

[Dr-Pete]

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.

[mosaicpro]

Maybe consider 301 redirect to a similar page on your website (similar content)