Deleted Rarely Visited Pages - Traffic Dropped (Big Time)

[jnfere]

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

[jnfere]

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.

[KeriMorgret]

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!

[jnfere]

Yup.  My traffic is starting to spike already.  This might be a good idea for a blog post...

[jnfere]

You better believe it! My traffic is already showing an upward spike.

[KeriMorgret]

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.

[jnfere]

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

[KeriMorgret]

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.

[jnfere]

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.

[KeriMorgret]

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.

[jnfere]

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.

[jnfere]

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.

[JaneCopland]

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?

[jnfere]

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.

[jnfere]

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.

[Andy-Halliday]

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?

[Vizergy]

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?