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.

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

Hi,

I would like to address the following part of your original query without even going to the article that you referred to:

"everyone seems to agree that you shouldn't canonicalize all pages in a series to the first page"

The reason for this is, if you canonicalize all the pages in a series to the first page, you are giving a hint to Google that only the first page is what you are concerned of and it should be indexed. With this, all the non-canonical pages will be taken out from the index which you would not want to happen especially when the content of these pages is unique.

So depending on your requirement you can opt for either a 'view all method' or 'rel=prev/next' method for your pagination requirements.

Good luck.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Thanks Doug. Really an eye-opener.

Hi Sorina,

I can tell you that the index dates shown by Google are accurate but is not the case with the Cache date sometimes as the date shown in the Cache and the copy shown in the cache don't match many times but the index dates are accurate. Send me a private message with the actual URLs under discussion and I will be able to comment with more clarity.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Sorina,

This is a common thing and it all depends on a site's crawlability (how easy is it to crawl for the bot) and crawl frequency for that site. Google would have picked up that post first on the bad site and then from the good site. However, just because one or two posts were picked up late does not mean that the good site is not crawler friendly. It also depends on how far the resource is from the root. Let us take an example:

A page on a good site: abc.com/folder1/folder2/folder3/page.html

Now a bad site copies that page: xyz.com/page.html

In this case, Google might first pickup the copied page from the bad site as it is just a click away from the root which is not the case with the good site where the page is nested deep inside multiple folders.

You can also give the way back machine (archive.org) a try to find which website published the post first. Sometimes this might work out pretty well. You can also try to look at the cache dates of the posts on both the sites in Google to get some info in this regard.

Hope those help. I wish you good luck.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Andrew,

The server on which your website is hosted is throwing a 500 server-side error. You better contact the hosting provider and get the issue fixed. You can use the HTTP header status checkers online like, web-sniffer.net and put the URL, http://www.interconnect.org.uk

All the other tools like W3C validator, http://builtwith.com/interconnect.org.uk etc gave the same result:

500 Internal Server Error

Best,

Devanur Rafi