Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Will redirecting poor traffic web pages increase web presence
-
A number of pages on my site have low traffic metrics. I intend to redirect poor performing pages to the most appropriate page with high traffic.
Example
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-greyshoes
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-greenshoes
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-redshoesall of the above will be redirected to the following page:
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/high-traffic-blackshoesQuestion
Will carrying out htaccess redirects from the above example influence to web positioning of both www.sampledomomain.co.uk/high-traffic-blackshoes and www.sampledomomain.co.ukRegards Mark
-
Hi Mark,
I would say that there will be negligible results in redirecting these pages unless they happen to have a high number of good inbound links from other sources. Redirecting the individual pages alone is unlikely to make a huge difference to the authority / strength / rankings of the high-traffic pages you redirect to or the domain itself.
If you were to do this, I would do it with usability in mind. Do people arriving on the low traffic pages regularly bounce? Do you believe that they would be more likely to convert if they arrived on the high traffic page? I am not a CRO expert so would stop short of making CRO testing advice.
The one SEO benefit I can think of would be if those low-traffic pages are contributing to any duplicate content issues on your site and redirecting them would count as "cleaning up" the site. This is definitely not for sure, so I'd still stick with the mindset that you'd be doing this for the purpose of directing traffic, not search engines.
I hope this helps.
Jane
-
No problem my friend and thanks for the information.
I still do not favor the idea of redirecting the low traffic pages to the high traffic ones.
Instead of doing it, you can run a banner kind of thing that apprises the visitors on the low traffic pages about the products (the pages that receive high traffic) that drive most of the traffic. Display a message with a link to the high traffic pages prominently so that they can access those pages from the low traffic pages themselves.Something like, "You might want to check out our all time bestseller or hot product". You can add a button or some kind of call to action when clicked upon will take the visitor to the page that you want to.
Redirecting bunch of pages will bring down the size of the website in the search engine index and you don't want that to happen.
Please feel free to write post back Mark.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi.
-
Dear Devanur,
Thank you for your response.
To date i have checked both Google Analytics, Keyword Planner, and live running Google Adwords Campaign. All have not yielded favourable traffic. Please bear in mind the low traffic examples stated previously have no bearing to my actual low traffic pages. However, I have seen almost 99.5% of customers hitting my high traffic page.
With this in mind, I cannot see any way that even to incentivise customers (based on your model) that any additional traffic can be found.
Therefore, would redirecting my low traffic pages still be beneficial?
Regards Mark
-
Agree with Chris. Redirecting low traffic pages to their high traffic counterparts is not a solution here for all the reasons mentioned by Chris. First of all, please do a thorough keyword research to find out if there is sizeable search volume for the keywords/phrases that are being targeted by the low traffic pages. It is quite possible that the phrase, 'black shoes' has higher search volume than any other colored shoes and that is the reason for that page to attract and drive good traffic.
Let me quote a situation here that we faced in the past. We had two products, one with a healthy search volume from local geography and the other had very low search volume. Except in few ways, the second product was as good as the first one. So we decided to create market for it as it lacked one here. We threw some freebies and ran a contest on our website and on social media platforms. This not only created awareness about the second product but also increased sales dramatically. Slowly, over a period of time, the search volumes for this product shot up which made us jumping with joy. Though this situation does not directly relate to your issue at hand, but just wanted to convey that, because something does not convert well, we should not drop our efforts to create more and more awareness about the product. Sometimes, adding in few extras with it might change the game for you. Just my two cents.
Wish you good luck my friend.
Best,
Devanur Rafi
-
Thank you Chris you your response.
The example provided was an over simplified scenario.
In reality, I will be driving the users to a high traffic page that has relevance. Additionally, users would seldom search for the low traffic pages and therefore by removing these from Google's index won't make them appear in the search. Within the high traffic page, I will give the user the experience and information on all low traffic content.
Please give your thoughts.
Regards Mark
-
if a user wants green shoes and goes to
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-greenshoes
but in fact then gets a page about black shoes what do you think they will do ?
I would think they would bounce and then turn your high traffic page to a low traffic page. It may make more sense to not try to trick users into going to pages, Google doesn't like tricks either.
If in doubt ignore SEO and look at it from a user point of view as that's what Google wants, it wants the best for a user. if you go to a site and you're redirected all over the place it doesn't make for a pleasant experience.
In Short, redirecting pages won't help in a longer term for SEO, making a good site for user experience with good content will help. Look at other ways to promote those pages, e.g make a review of a product on the page etc.
Hope that helps a bit.
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
-
Insane traffic loss and indexed pages after June Core Update, what can i do to bring it back?
Hello Everybody! After June Core Update was released, we saw an insane drop on traffic/revenue and indexed pages on GSC (Image attached below) The biggest problem here was: Our pages that were out of the index were shown as "Blocked by robots.txt", and when we run the "fetch as Google" tool, it says "Crawl Anomaly". Even though, our robots.txt it's completely clean (Without any disallow's or noindex rules), so I strongly believe that the reason that this pattern of error is showing, is because of the June Core Update. I've come up with some solutions, but none of them seems to work: 1- Add hreflang on the domain: We have other sites in other countries, and ours seems like it's the only one without this tag. The June update was primarily made to minimize two SERP results per domain (or more if google thinks it's relevant). Maybe other sites have "taken our spot" on the SERPS, our domain is considerably newer in comparison to the other countries. 2- Mannualy index all the important pages that were lost The idea was to renew the content on the page (title, meta description, paragraphs and so on) and use the manual GSC index tool. But none of that seems to work as well, all it says is "Crawl Anomaly". 3- Create a new domain If nothing works, this should. We would be looking for a new domain name and treat it as a whole new site. (But frankly, it should be some other way out, this is for an EXTREME case and if nobody could help us. ) I'm open for ideas, and as the days have gone by, our organic revenue and traffic doesn't seem like it's coming up again. I'm Desperate for a solution Any Ideas gCi46YE
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muriloacct0 -
Magento 1.9 SEO. I have product pages with identical On Page SEO score in the 90's. Some pull up Google page 1 some won't pull up at all. I am searching for the exact title on that page.
I have a website built on Magento 1.9. There are approximately 290,000 part numbers on the site. I am sampling Google SERP results. About 20% of the keywords show up on page 1 position 5 thru 10. 80% don't show up at all. When I do a MOZ page score I get high 80's to 90's. A page score of 89 on one part # may show up on page one, An identical page score on a different part # can't be found on Google. I am searching for the exact part # in the page title. Any thoughts on what may be going on? This seems to me like a Magento SEO issue.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CTOPDS0 -
How to increase Page authority of old blog posts
Hi, How can I increase the page authority of old blog posts? There are many posts that are ranking well (Page 1 lower or Page 2) - but I want to make them rank higher by making the post more usable, better UI, design, content relaunches etc - these all would inherently mean improving Page authority also eventually. What are some concrete steps I can take to improve page authority of blog pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pks3331 -
Pages that did NOT 301 redirect to the new site
Hi, Is there a tool out there that can tell me what pages did NOT 301 redirect to the new sites? I need something rather than going into google.com and typing in site:oldsite.com to see if it's still indexed and if it's not 301 redirecting.. I'm not sure if screaming frog can do that. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
What to do when your home page an index for a series of pages.
I have created an index stack. My home page is http://www.southernwhitewater.com The home page is the index itself and the 1st page http://www.southernwhitewater.com/nz-adventure-tours-whitewater-river-rafting-hunting-fishing My home page (if your look at it through moz bat for chrome bar} incorporates all the pages in the index. Is this Bad? I would prefer to index each page separately. As per my site index in the footer What is the best way to optimize all these pages individually and still have the customers arrive at the top to a picture. rel= canonical? Any help would be great!! http://www.southernwhitewater.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VelocityWebsites0 -
Redirecting Pages from site A to site B
Hi, I have a client who have a solid, high ranking content based site (site A). They have now created an ecommerce site in addition (site B). To give site B a boost in terms of search engine visibility upon launch, they now wish to redirect approx 90% of site As pages to site B. What would be the implications of this? Apart from customers being automatically redirected from the page they thought they where landing on, how would google now view site A? What are your thoughts to thier idea. I am trying to talk them out of it as I think its a poor one.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webrevolve0 -
How to avoid content canibalizm? How do I control which page is the landing page?
Hi All, To clarify my question I will give an example. Let's assume that I have a laptop e-commerce site and that one of my main categories is Samsung Laptops. The category page shows lots of laptops and a small section of text. On the other hand, in my article section I have a HUGE article about Samsung Laptops. If we consider the two word phrases each page is targeting then the answer is the same - Samsung Laptops. On the article i point to the category page using anchor such as "buy samsung laptops" or "samsung laptops" and on the category page (my wishful landing page) I point to the article with "learn about samsung laptops" or "samsung laptops pros and cons". Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Will pages irrelevant to a site's core content dilute SEO value of core pages?
We have a website with around 40 product pages. We also have around 300 pages with individual ingredients used for the products and on top of that we have some 400 pages of individual retailers which stock the products. Ingredient pages have same basic short info about the ingredients and the retail pages just have the retailer name, adress and content details. Question is, should I add noindex to all the ingredient and or retailer pages so that the focus is entirely on the product pages? Thanks for you help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ArchMedia0