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
-
Drop in Bounce Rate in Google Analytics
Hi guys, I have recently seen a large drop in bounce rate (from GA) which seems unnatural for one of our clients website. Since the start of 2018, the bounce rate was consistently between 40-60%, and then saw a random spike, and now for the past two weeks, the bounce rate is below 10%. I was wondering if anyone had any ideas if this is a problem with GA, or the site itself. Site: https://www.zoomocarcredit.com/ Any comments/feedback is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance! Jack. SnP0Hc4
Reporting & Analytics | | ChemistryMarketing0 -
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 -
Search traffic hit after switching magazine to subdomain
Hi there, I'm fairly new at all of this and would appreciate any help with understanding why our website has taken a hit in traffic. We curate an online magazine, which was previously accessible through: forensicoutreach.com. It was receiving about 2,000+ unique visitors per day up until a week ago, when we changed a few things. However, the magazine doesn't reflect what our business does, so we created a product-focused web presence on forensicoutreach.com, and moved the magazine (which everyone loved) to library.forensicoutreach.com (DA 37, PA 1). We thought separating the properties was a good idea, but now I'm not so sure. Our traffic on library.forensicoutreach.com is 1,500 (so 500 less than usual!) and our main property has about 56 unique visits a day. It's pretty substantial. A few questions: 1. If we move the library to forensicoutreach.com/library, will that make any difference? 2. Where did we go wrong here and how can we fix it? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | shivaniseos1 -
Referral Traffic vs. Campaign Traffic in Google Analytics
I have two sites: a blog and an ecommerce site. The blog funnels people to the ecommerce site. In Analytics I'm seeing declines in referral traffic from the blog to the ecommerce site. During the same time I'm seeing an increase in campaign traffic to the ecommerce site, with most campaign traffic coming from the blog. I believe the increase in campaign traffic is largely a result of simply having installed more tracking links. This leads me to believe that the declines I'm seeing in referral traffic is simply a result of the increase in campaign traffic. In other words, what was once counted and reported as being referral traffic is now being counted and reported as campaign traffic. So my question is this: In Google Analytics is campaign traffic ALSO reported as referral traffic, or is campaign traffic reported separately and not duplicated in referral traffic reports? I'll provide a concrete example to make this more clear in case it isn't: Say site X sends 1000 visits each month to site Y. Say 50 of those visits come from a single link on X. If that link is changed so that campaign Z data info added (via the Google URL Builder), would you expect to then see 950 referral visits each month from site X to site Y plus 50 campaign visits to site Y via new campaign Z, or would you continue to see 1000 referral visits plus the new 50 campaign visits? Many thanks in advance to anyone that can shed some light on this.
Reporting & Analytics | | aaronprimal0 -
Landing page URL appearing as keyword
Hi Mozers, I've recently experienced the URLs of my key landing pages coming up as keywords. This has been on the rise since early July (when it was relatively insignificant) to the current position (see image below) where they make up the majority of my top keywords. Drilling down into a bit more detail, this seems to be almost exclusively Desktop traffic but in terms of Technology there are no clear standouts (seems to be mostly Windows OS and Chrome). Has anyone else been experiencing this?
Reporting & Analytics | | mopland0 -
Does anyone know of a way to do a profile level filter to exclude all traffic if it enters the site via certain landing pages?
Does anyone know of a way to do a profile level filter to exclude all traffic if it enters the site via certain landing pages? The problem I have is that we have several pages that are served to visitors of numerous other domains but are also served to visitors of our site. We end up with inflated Google Analytics numbers because people are viewing these pages from our partners' domains but never actually entering our site. I've made an advanced segment that serves the purpose but I'd really like to filter it at the profile level so the numbers across the board are more accurate without having to apply an advanced segment to every report. The advanced segment excludes visits that hit these pages as landing pages but includes visits where people have come from other pages on our domain. I know that you can do profile filters to exclude visits to pages or directories entirely but is there a way to filter them only if they are a landing pages? Any other creative thoughts? Thanks in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | ATIseo0 -
False inflation in traffic
Hi- We are seeing an inflation in our traffic via Webgain in Germany. Our team in Germany does not use Webgains Our team in the US does not participate in any affiliate networks/programs Any ideas on why we would be seeing this inflation in just one region?
Reporting & Analytics | | K2_Sports0 -
Conversion Rate Question: Should I Measure Visits or Unique Visits?
When you measure conversion rates, is the equation: conversion rate = visits/conversions or conversion rate = unique visits/conversions I ask because it can actually make a pretty big difference in the conversion rate. For example, if you visit my ecommerce website 100 times before buying something (and assuming you're my only visitor), then my conversion rate is 100% _if I'm determining conversion rates by unique visits/conversions. _However, it's only 1% _if I'm determining conversion rates by visits/conversions. _Wow! Now this is clearly an extreme example, but it should serve to illustrate the point that in more reasonable cases, the way the data is measured can have a potentially significant impact on the conversion rate. Is there an industry standard for this? Am I missing something really basic? Also, here's a little bit of context for the question: I run an ecommerce website powered by the Magento CMS and I'm trying to measure my conversion rate in Google Analytics for individual products. Google Analytics shows me my site wide conversion rate, but apparently I have to do some customization in order to measure conversion rates on the product level. That's fine, but I want to make sure I'm measuring my product conversions in a standard way. Thanks for any and all help! Adam
Reporting & Analytics | | Adam-Perlman0