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