Should I index news and blog posts which receive little traffic
-
Hi all,
I have a very large site at the moment with a handful of high authority pages with great content which describe the charity's work.
But the main content on the site is blogs and news article which, while being good quality content from a reader's point of view, receive little traffic from search engines as they are so niche and long-tail.
They do, however, get ok internal traffic from other pages.
Should these pages be indexed still or should I remove them? Is there a rule of thumb regarding minimum clicks/bounce rates that an indexed page should have?
What do big news agencies do with really niche articles that may get next to no traffic but have valuable content on for those that do click through?
Thanks in advance!
Den
-
Thanks Tom - that was what I was hoping!
Am I right in thinking the main things to un-index are:
- Internal SERP pages
- Internal category pages (eg http://www.merlin.org.uk/category/floods)
- Duplicate pages from pagination etc
All the best and many thanks.
-
Hi Den
Your analytics data, so your traffic, bounce rate, dwell time etc. are not ranking factors - Google is quite explicit on this. The exception being site speed.
Therefore, there's no problem keeping these pages indexed, even if they receive little to no external traffic. Furthermore, I'd keep them for the long-tail reason - you never know when that long-tail may pick up some converting traffic. You may as well leave it out there as it's not hurting anyone, especially not your site.
Hope this helps!
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
-
Old Blog Posts
Every single day we publish articles that have a high amount of engagement onsite 50-300 comments. We have been running for around 8 years now and have a rather bloated database of old stale posts. We post advice on betting on sports. Not guides as such but tips for events. After the event has started the posts are outdated. What is your advice for these? These articles are not seen as "thin" but rather outdated. There is no way possible for me to update the content as such. Also out right deleting the content would go against our openness and transparency of past selections advised.
On-Page Optimization | | MrDeeBee0 -
Is this blog running on the Genesis Framework?
Hi all, WordPress isn't my area of specialty in terms of themes and identifying what a blog might currently be using. Here's the link: http://www.pens.com/blog I've had one developer tell me this blog is on the Genesis framework and another one told me it is not. Can someone weigh in here and also give me some tips on how to know one way or the other? If it is not on the Genesis Framework, can you provide any helpful links/tutorials on how to get this blog onto the Genesis Framework? We want to be able to use Yoast SEO and apparently our current theme will not allow us to do so. Thanks in advance! Dana
On-Page Optimization | | danatanseo0 -
Sitemap include all site links or just ones we want indexed?
Got a quick sitemap question. We have a clients site built in opencart and are getting ready to submit the sitmap. The default sitemap setting generates urls right off of the root. For example site.com/product. These urls are also accessible through the site itself. We prefer to give the site some depth and have structured the products so the urls are site.com/category/product. All of the product pages have canonicals including the category so we should not have to worry about duplicate content on the /product page vs the /category/product page. My question is both types of product pages are included in the sitemap at the moment. Since we don't want google to index the /product urls should we leave them off of the sitemap even though they are readily accessible from the frontend(though not linked)? Or just leave them and let the canonical tag be used in directing google as to which urls to index. Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | Whebb0 -
Post url not matching with post title ( wordpress)
I have this site called searchoflife.com on which I have noticed the post urls are not matching with the post title. For Example:Post Title - A Dialogue With NaturePost URL - http://searchoflife.com/dialogue-nature-2013-09-12 Words like 'A' and 'with' are not present in the post URL. This has been the trend since a few days. After investigating I found out that it was due to my plugin SEO ultimate which is actually creating post slugs automatically for the post urls. So my question is whether it is advisable to use post slugs instead of the full post url. Does it affect the SERPS for my site?
On-Page Optimization | | toxicpls0 -
When You Add a Robots.txt file to a website to block certain URLs, do they disappear from Google's index?
I have seen several websites recently that have have far too many webpages indexed by Google, because for each blog post they publish, Google might index the following: www.mywebsite.com/blog/title-of-post www.mywebsite.com/blog/tag/tag1 www.mywebsite.com/blog/tag/tag2 www.mywebsite.com/blog/category/categoryA etc My question is: if you add a robots.txt file that tells Google NOT to index pages in the "tag" and "category" folder, does that mean that the previously indexed pages will eventually disappear from Google's index? Or does it just mean that newly created pages won't get added to the index? Or does it mean nothing at all? thanks for any insight!
On-Page Optimization | | williammarlow0 -
Is that a problem for indexing?
Hi all, I have an issue driving me crazy thant I think it could be impacting in the SERPs. My site has a spanish version "www.tarifakitesurfcamp" and an english version "www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/en". These two "pages" in the CMS ("inicio" and "home") have the same title and the same description tag (in spanish) as the plugin ALL in one SEO only allows me to write one unique title and description for the home page via GENERAL OPTIONS (there's an option for "home title" and for "home description").. If a try to assign a title and a description individually for each page it doesn't work (I can't see the titles and description in the source code" of those pages. On the other hand, there's another page that is http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/?attachment_id= which I can't locate in the CMS within pages section. This page has the same tittle and description as well. Could anyone give me a solution? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | juanmiguelcr0 -
Why will google not index my Images
Hi I've added to index images in our sitemap although they are showing as being submitted Google hasn't indexed a single one. This has been the case for about 3 months. Is there any reason why Google would not index them? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | tidybooks0 -
Wordpress Pages vs. Posts
When building a blog to promote a particular affiliate offer, I usually like to use a static "page" homepage and then have my posts displayed on another part of my site. I've noticed that my wordpress pages almost always rank higher than wordpress posts and I can't explain it... Here are some possibilities I've thought of: XML Sitemap priority is set at 60% for pages and only 20% for posts My main navbar lists the pages which consequently means they get linked to on every page on my website. Some other phenomenon within the wordpress framework... If it helps, I use Thesis v1.8 on all my sites. I guess my ultimate question is: If pages do in fact rank higher than posts, is it worth it for me to go back and change the site structure on all my blogs which are using posts instead of pages. I know making major modifications like that can be disasterous but will it ultimately pay off? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | drewhammond1