Deleted Rarely Visited Pages - Traffic Dropped (Big Time)
-
Hi folks:
I'd appreciate any thoughts you might have on a problem I am having with organic traffic. One of our sites has about 500 pages/blog posts. We had about 200 pages that no one was visiting, or only one to ten people had visited in an entire year. As a result, we decided to experiment, and delete any page which had fewer than 5 visits in a year. This resulted in a deletion of about 90 pages.We did this on April 6 or 7 of this year.
Two days later, we had a substantial drop in visits to the site. We had been getting about 300 sessions a day. Now, we are lucky to get that in a month.
I know there was an algorithm update in late March, but our traffic dropped about two weeks after that, and a day or so after the deletion of the pages. There is a clear demarcation on analytics.
I gave it a month, the traffic did not recover, so we decided to restore the pages. Traffic has not recovered and it has been about 3 months now.
Does anyone have any thoughts on why we might have experienced such a drastic drop as well as what we might do to recover from it?
Thanks very much
-
I was thinking my own blog, but I certainly would be honored to write for Moz. I will look at the link.
Right now, after the stress of today and proof my site is not, in fact destroyed, I am going to go to bed
Really, thanks, everyone. A lot of you provided little bits of information that helped me figure it out. This is a great site.
-
If you'd like some direction, I'm happy to point you towards http://moz.com/blog/inside-youmoz-how-to-guest-blog-for-moz for writing that blog post!
-
Yup. My traffic is starting to spike already. This might be a good idea for a blog post...
-
You better believe it! My traffic is already showing an upward spike.
-
Also, I had to ask on this forum myself to figure out the low bounce rate. So glad you figured it out! On the plus side, this is one thing you're likely to never overlook again in the future.
-
Now I feel a bit less foolish, thank you. My biggest mistake (since I wasn't the one who changed the code after all) is that I insisted on focusing on the deletion of the pages. I didn't remember the change in the tracking code, so for the life of me, I couldn't figure out what had happened. I knew that we hadn't been hit by a penalty, actually, hummingbird helped us quite a bit. The whole thing made no sense to me. It made no sense to anyone else either
-
It's only because I've been in this same situation myself -- put on GA code in both the footer and in a WP plugin, didn't detect it because I was viewing the source while logged in as an admin, which had suppressed the plugin's script, and wondered why my bounce rate was so low.
-
Good idea. I noted what happened on my calendar, but you are right, I should put a note in GA as well. Thanks for the suggestion.
-
Be sure to make a note of this in GA, so that when you look back two years later (or someone else takes a peek), you remember what happened. Probably also doubled your page views, too.
-
I thought you would like to know, I figured out the problem. My traffic had not dropped at all. The problem was actually with the tracking code. When my programmer went to add in the new, more advanced Google tracking code, it didn't work properly. I was actually waiting for Yoast to update its plugin to work with the new code, so I put it out of my mind for the moment.
Well, the initial effort to put in the new code caused a problem, resulting in (a) an artificially low bounce rate and (b) artificially low traffic reporting.
The page deletion had nothing to do with it.
Phew.
Thank you, everyone, for your input.
-
Hi, thanks for your answer. It does seem that there was a compilation of traffic from the pages. I am not sure if the data as far as how much visitation was going on was incorrect and so that is why the impact was so drastic. I submitted a new sitemap when I removed the pages, so perhaps that accounts for the fast result? I cannot say. But your point is a very good one.
I will take a look at the cached version for some of the pages. Good idea.
-
Hi Jennifer,
I am wondering if perhaps the drop in traffic was not related to the removal of the pages. You say the drop happened just a day or two after the pages were removed. While Google works very fast with indexing new content, it should take a little longer than a day to process the removal / redirection of a large number of unpopular pages. It doesn't crawl rarely-updated / rarely-visited URLs on a regular basis (you can check on the last date a page was cached quite easily: http://i.imgur.com/NPmTF5S.png
Does analytics give you a good idea of where the missing traffic used to come from, i.e. which pages are not receiving traffic that did before?
-
No errors in webmaster tools. No drop in authority that I noticed. The authority wasn't huge to begin with. The site had about 300-400 sessions per day before the drop.
We definitely have a lot of long tail traffic. But not on those particular pages, at least, not according to Google when I looked at how much traffic each page was getting. I would think, if there was traffic going to those pages, restoring them would restore the traffic. But it hasn't.
I am as confused as anyone.
-
We used 301 redirects. I made sure to delete all links and confirmed it with brokenlink checker. Now the pages are back, so there is no redirection going on.
-
Hi
What does webmaster tools say. Is it showing any errors.
Also as Vizergy said, did you do 301 re-directs.
You might have been benefiting from long tail SEO, but these pages should have been traffic?
Has your domain Authority dropped in this time period?
-
When you deleted the pages did you 301 the URls to relevant live pages or did they return 404 errors? Did the deleted pages have a lot of links going to them?
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
-
Is GA Real-Time Locations Broken?
When I look at my real-time site traffic in GA, I'm seeing a lot of direct traffic from Montvale, NJ. However, when I go to the audience tab for today or any day in the past, Montvale doesn't even show up in the list of cities sending traffic. What am I missing here?
Reporting & Analytics | | jimbeaux_slice2 -
Referral Traffic Issue
I'm working on a site that has low traffic volumes due to its niche. That's fine but we are daily getting referral traffic from unrelated domains without a link. These visits are always 100% bounce which is impacting the overall click.through rate. The domains are not the same and different ones come through all the time, so it is difficult to keep on top of. Any ideas what could be going on here and an effective way of dealing with this?
Reporting & Analytics | | MickEdwards0 -
Does Google Analytics track conversions in real time?
Looking at the section: Conversions > Goals > Overview - does Google Analytics provide real time / same day metrics for this conversion data or does it take 24 hrs?
Reporting & Analytics | | Rich_Coffman0 -
Landing pages report - Meaning of clics metric
Hi there, I am looking at the landing pages report on Google Analytics, I see 4 columns: Impressiones Clics Average position CTR Regarding the clics metric, this shouldn't be equal to the sessions of organic traffic that you get? In Adwords, a clic is a session. What I see is that clics are not sessions and I am a bit surprised of this. Why are they different in this report? Thanks and regards Thanks and regards
Reporting & Analytics | | footd0 -
Ideas for a strange surge in direct traffic
Being the type of person that can't stop checking my Google Analytics, I noticed this morning that between the hours of 12 and 2 central time last night I recieved a strange surge of direct traffic. My site typically gets around 40 direct visits per day (most of them coming during peak hours around the time people are getting off of work). I received 150 direct visits during this random time in the middle of the night. My bounce rate soared as almost every visit was a bounce. The visitors locations are spread out as if it is natural human traffic. Every single one of the visitors is using a chrome browser. Has anyone else run into something like this? All I can think of is that someone might have an addon or toolbar for chrome that linked to my site for a while in a way that caused unsuspecting visitors to end up on my page. For now I'm keeping my fingers crossed and hoping the traffic doesn't return, as it could be bad news for my Adsense. *Edit: Also of particular interest, each direct visit went to an internal page on my site and no two of the 150 visits went to the same internal page. I also added an image showing a normal complete day's direct traffic and my direct traffic for today so far (The bulk of the surge came yesterday but the shot from today illustrates the surge better because it is missing my naturally daily direct traffic that comes in the afternoon) heXFb#LiiEr
Reporting & Analytics | | pattersonla0 -
How to filter pages in Analytics by multiple criteria
Hello, we have several pages with the same page title. Now out of all those pages I want to pick two. Let's call them "/page1" and "/page2". For those pages I want the following information (combined for both): Avg. time on page, Bounce rate, Navigation Summary Normally I get all the information under "Content" "Pages" and by choosing the "page title" as primary dimension and clicking on the respective page title. Let's call it "page | title". Choosing the filter for 1 page works fine (I just enter "/page1" in simple filter). But how can I filter for two pages ( entering " include page ends with /page1 and include page ends with /page2" in the advance filter will show 0 results). Thanks in advance
Reporting & Analytics | | guitarslinger0 -
Correlation between google and yahoo indexed pages
My blog ocpatentlawyer.com has about 130 pages or so. Google has indexed most if not all of the posts and pages. In contrast, yahoo has only indexed about 1/4 of the pages and posts. Are there any actions that can be taken based on this information? For example, if i prepare a blog post should I prepare it so that it will most likely be indexed into yahoo knowing that google will also index it. If so, how can i prepare blog posts that will most likely be indexed into yahoo's index?
Reporting & Analytics | | jamesjd70 -
Abnormal Spike in Traffic- Ddos or what?
We've noticed a 100% increase in our traffic over the last three days. However, the page views have not increased proportionately. The traffic sources seemed to be dispersed naturally. Could this be a Ddos in the making or some other type of attack as it seems unlikely that we suddenly started receiving thousands of extra visitors. Its a leading news website with a consistent heavy traffic daily which just doubled over the last three days. What should we be looking at?
Reporting & Analytics | | RishadShaikh590