Page Retirement
-
I have a site with 6000 indexed urls. 1,500 have traffic I feel is valuable and 4,500 with almost no traffic (perhaps less than 10 page views in a year). These 4500 are inedxed but have 1 or less in bound links.
If I retire the pages, will I help or hurt my Domain Authority and separately my rankings that could produce traffic?
I'd appreciate any consideration.
Jeffrey Strassman
-
Thanks Man,
I have done some page retirement previously, when Penguin and Panda were haunting some sites. I 301 the good links elsewhere and retired pages with otherwise spammy links.
I thought there might be a way to reclaim some links and retire pages that were not ranking or creating visits.
Thanks for your thoughts and recommendation.
Jeff
-
Hi Jeffrey,
I wouldn't remove unique content from a site - ever. If the keyword volume is 'too large for our content to be ranking' than there should be some long-tails available for you to go for. Look for long-tails by typing in the 'large keyword volume' keywords into Google and taking note of what appears in Google Suggest and the 'suggested searches.' There are several tools that can assist with this, but most require violating Google's scraping policy so I won't mention them here (PM me).
0-15 pageviews a year is 0-15 pageviews more than you had before. That could be an extra 20,000 visitors to your site in a given year. Doesn't sound like a waste to me at all.
-
Thank David,
75% of the urls have unique content. We are a medical journal publishing CLINICAL information for Primary Care Doctors. Most of the URLs have unique content, talking to a wide group of doctors. The keyword volume is either too large for our content to be ranking or too small for the search engine volume to help us much.
Since most of those URLs have one, two or no links, and 0 - 15 pageviews in a year, I though to retire them, but I might loose keyword rank or who knows.
I hope that helps. 25% of the urls of us blogging about reports we feel might be valuable. Its our URL but mostly stuff we find on the web that we somewhat aggregate.
JEff
-
Hi Jeffrey,
We can't answer your question without knowing more about the content on the 4500 pages. Is their unique, relevant content on each page or are they essentially duplicates of other pages on your site?
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
-
Strange 404 Pages Appearing in Google Analytics
Hi, My client has some strange urls appearing in GA which lead to error pages. Please see the following image: https://imgur.com/a/6TPO8yL e.g URLs like /h/6445738.html I've used screaming frog to see if these pages exist on the website and I can't find them, anywhere. Therefore how are they coming up in GA? If anyone could please help I'd really appreciate it.
Reporting & Analytics | | SolveWebMedia0 -
Sudden Increase In Number of Pages Indexed By Google Webmaster When No New Pages Added
Greetings MOZ Community: On June 14th Google Webmaster tools indicated an increase in the number of indexed pages, going from 676 to 851 pages. New pages had been added to the domain in the previous month. The number of pages blocked by robots increased at that time from 332 (June 1st) to 551 June 22nd), yet the number of indexed pages still increased to 851. The following changes occurred between June 5th and June 15th: -A new redesigned version of the site was launched on June 4th, with some links to social media and blog removed on some pages, but with no new URLs added. The design platform was and is Wordpress. -Google GTM code was added to the site. -An exception was made by our hosting company to ModSecurity on our server (for i-frames) to allow GTM to function. In the last ten days my web traffic has decline about 15%, however the quality of traffic has declined enormously and the number of new inquiries we get is off by around 65%. Click through rates have declined from about 2.55 pages to about 2 pages. Obviously this is not a good situation. My SEO provider, a reputable firm endorsed by MOZ, believes the extra 175 pages indexed by Google, pages that do not offer much content, may be causing the ranking decline. My developer is examining the issue. They think there may be some tie in with the installation of GTM. They are noticing an additional issue, the sites Contact Us form will not work if the GTM script is enabled. They find it curious that both issues occurred around the same time. Our domain is www.nyc-officespace-leader. Does anyone have any idea why these extra pages are appearing and how they can be removed? Anyone have experience with GTM causing issues with this? Thanks everyone!!!
Reporting & Analytics | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Best way to handle duplicate title on Home page?
Moz reports two links to the same Home page ad duplicate titles ... http://myhjhome.com/index.php
Reporting & Analytics | | ElykInnovation
http://myhjhome.com I'm not sure if I should just 301 redirect http://myhjhome.com/index.php to http://myhjhome.com, or if there is a better way to handle that? Or should I comb the website and make sure all links to the Home page dont include index.php? Just looking for some extra help here, learning as I'm going, thanks!!0 -
Relation between Page and Landing Page
Hi all, I am looking through the Analytics data on a specific 'page' (404.html which is the Not found page) and as my secondary dimensions, I have Landing Page data. Now am I not sure how the page and the landing page are related here. Is it basically saying 58 Page views of the 404.html were originated by the users who landed on brochures.html? If someone could provide any pointers on it, it would be great. Thank you for your time. uZQJ
Reporting & Analytics | | nirpan0 -
Setting up Goals in Analytics when no common 'order confirmation' type page
Hi I'm working on a project/client and have asked them for the common url that shows whenever user finishes the purchase process so i cant set it up as a Goal in GA so we can track conversions etc Since site is dynamically generated it does not have such a page. Dev are suggesting setting up a new goal, generate a URL and script and they will append to a similar call. Does this make sense/sound like it would work ? And is it quite easy to do that in Analytics ? Normally i just add a URL as a goal and jobs done, don't know about scripts etc ! Cheers Dan set up a new Goal and generate a URL and script and send that to us and we'll append this to a similar call we already did for this at your request originally
Reporting & Analytics | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Major practices which helps to index pages by google.
Actually, We have submitted more than 100 pages in to google through xml sitemap. But, we see in that 75% of the pages where indexed by google. Note : Excluding the duplicate pages
Reporting & Analytics | | Webworld_Norway0 -
Analytics: How to see how many uniques viewed over X amount of pages in period
Hey guys, anyone any idea how to do the following in google analytics? I need a little help, I am looking at my traffic for a given month, I can see how many unique users visit over X amount of times, but can instead of visits, can I see how many unique users I had that looked at X amount of pages or more? Appreciate all help!! 🙂
Reporting & Analytics | | MirandaP0 -
In-Page Analytics
Hey folks, In the in-page analytics section of GA I am wanting to get the % of clicks on a particular link over a large selection of dates. Does anyone know how to pull the data without having to do it day by day? Ideally I want to pull it all at once. There might of course be other ways to do this, if so please let me know. Thanks for your help. Cheers,
Reporting & Analytics | | CraigAddyman0