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
-
Strange landing page in Google Analytics
Hello MOZ Community, The website in question is https://x-y.com/ When i looked at the landing pages report in GA , x-y.com is appended at the end of every URL like this. https://x-y.com/x-y.com When i open the above URL in GA interface, it shows page not found. This is obvious as there is no such URL.
Reporting & Analytics | | Johnroger
The metrics like sessions, Users, Bounce rate all look good. In the property settings, The default URL is written like this http:// cell-gate.com (Please note that s is missing in property settings). But how is traffic tracked correctly How do i solve this problem. What settings should we change to make the landing pages report look ok Thanks0 -
Right way to delete and update old blog-posts?
Hi all, Rand Fishkin once tweeted about success story of Quickbooks blog as they deleted their old and outdated content to show only high quality content to their audience. We are planning to implement the same strategy to our blog which consists of 800+ blog-posts. I'm just wondering the best way to proceed on this and planning to follow as below. Please correct me if I'm wrong and if there are any better steps of follow: Get the list of blog-posts. Check the traffic of each blog-post. If the blog-post needs to be existed, update any info on the blog. If the blog no more needed, do I need to delete or noindex or redirect? What's the better way to measure the success? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | vtmoz1 -
UTM Links Showing Up as Separate Pages in Google Analytics
Hey everyone, I was just looking at landing pages in Google Analytics, and in addition to just the URL of the landing page, the UTM links are being listed as separate pages. Is this normal? I anticipated seeing the landing page URL and then using the secondary dimension to see source/medium. If this isn't normal, what would I check next?
Reporting & Analytics | | rachelmeyer0 -
How do I track specific referral traffics journey through a website?
Hello, A client has asked us to track the journey each separate referral traffic visitor takes through out the website. I have had a look through analytics and am not sure how to ensure I can do this for all referral traffic visitors? Can anyone help? Thank you.
Reporting & Analytics | | mblsolutions0 -
Is there a way to map your on-page SEO changes with the organic growth?
Hi Mozzers, I was just wondering if there's a way we can map our on-page SEO changes with the increase/decrease in organic traffic. For instance, I introduced brand pages' link the product page breadcrumbs and suddenly organic traffic for my brand pages increase from X to 2X in 1 couple of weeks. Now, this can be because of this breadcrumb change purely or because of some algorithm update or may be, bots started finding the content interesting and hence, started ranking them up (in case the brand pages were launched recently). So, you can't say which change should be mapped to what increase/decrease in organic traffic. Or, is there a way to map this?
Reporting & Analytics | | _nitman0 -
Moz Crawl shows over 100 times more pages than my site has?
The latest crawl stats are attached. My site has just over 300 pages? Wondering what I have done wrong? RRv3fR0
Reporting & Analytics | | Billboard20120 -
Switch to www from non www preference negatively hit # pages indexed
I have a client whose site did not use the www preference but rather the non www form of the url. We were having trouble seeing some high quality inlinks and I wondered if the redirect to the non www site from the links was making it hard for us to track. After some reading, it seemed we should be using the www version for better SEO anyway so I made a change on Monday but had a major hit to the number of pages being indexed by Thursday. Freaking me out mildly. What are people's thoughts? I think I should roll back the www change asap - or am I jumping the gun?
Reporting & Analytics | | BrigitteMN0 -
Has Google changed its algorithm? My traffic has almost doubled and I don't know why.
My traffic has nearly doubled over the past few days, and my conversion rate has doubled as well. It looks like our rankings haven't changed... We haven't done anything to the site recently, although we did submit a couple of press releases through the wire not too long ago (within the last few weeks). I do not think that this is a cyclical/seasonal jump in traffic because last year this did not occur. Any ideas?
Reporting & Analytics | | deuce1s0