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
-
What is the most effective way of selecting a top keyword per page on a site?
We are creating fresh content for outdated sites and I need to identify the most significant keyword per page for the content developers, What is the best way to do this?
Reporting & Analytics | | Sable_Group0 -
Help Blocking Crawlers. Huge Spike in "Direct Visits" with 96% Bounce Rate & Low Pages/Visit.
Hello, I'm hoping one of you search geniuses can help me. We have a successful client who started seeing a HUGE spike in direct visits as reported by Google Analytics. This traffic now represents approximately 70% of all website traffic. These "direct visits" have a bounce rate of 96%+ and only 1-2 pages/visit. This is skewing our analytics in a big way and rendering them pretty much useless. I suspect this is some sort of crawler activity but we have no access to the server log files to verify this or identify the culprit. The client's site is on a GoDaddy Managed WordPress hosting account. The way I see it, there are a couple of possibilities.
Reporting & Analytics | | EricFish
1.) Our client's competitors are scraping the site on a regular basis to stay on top of site modifications, keyword emphasis, etc. It seems like whenever we make meaningful changes to the site, one of their competitors does a knock-off a few days later. Hmmm. 2.) Our client's competitors have this crawler hitting the site thousands of times a day to raise bounce rates and decrease the average time on site, which could like have an negative impact on SEO. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't believe Google is going to reward sites with 90% bounce rates, 1-2 pages/visit and an 18 second average time on site. The bottom line is that we need to identify these bogus "direct visits" and find a way to block them. I've seen several WordPress plugins that claim to help with this but I certainly don't want to block valid crawlers, especially Google, from accessing the site. If someone out there could please weigh in on this and help us resolve the issue, I'd really appreciate it. Heck, I'll even name my third-born after you. Thanks for your help. Eric0 -
How to hook up a ppc campaign to a google + Page
Greetings,
Reporting & Analytics | | Nightwing
Sometimes you just want to give Google a big slap for making straight forward requests damn impossible. So all i ma trying to ad is point a ppc ad at this Google + account <a>https://plus.google.com/118393512656496298734#118393512656496298734/posts</a> But i get a warning sign saying:
"The URL must be for a Google+ page, not a personal profile" I then spend half an hour tring to find a Google + page but get no where fast 😞 Warning message illustrated here:
http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/google-page-plus_zps46ff995a.jpg So my question is please how to a get the Google + page for this account:
<a>https://plus.google.com/118393512656496298734#118393512656496298734/posts</a> Any insights welcome!
David0 -
Direct Traffic Source?
Hi all, Having some trouble figuring out a metric I'm dissecting. We have a large amount of traffic going to deep pages and I'm looking at the traffic source and an alarming amount are coming as Direct traffic. The thing is this can't type in or bookmarked traffic, so what else could it be? We have numbers like 80% and 60% for direct traffic, which judging by our previous efforts, that just can't right. Anyone can figure out what I may be missing out? Deeper pages should usually not get as much Direct traffic, so what can it be?
Reporting & Analytics | | William.Lau0 -
A switch from Search to Direct traffic from Feb 2012
I have read about the Google algorithm updates galore in 2012. I would therefore be inclined to suspect a sudden sharp drop in Search traffic this year to be caused by such updates. However, I am seeing what appears to be a direct switch from 'Search' to 'Direct' traffic as of about February 16th this year. There are no specific brand-building exercises or general advertising campaigns happening around this time for the site in question. It seems very UN-explainable? I wondered if there are any thoughts from the various lurking gurus? I have attached GA screenshot.. DjTu1.png
Reporting & Analytics | | MikiP0 -
Changed URL's, traffic dropped from 2k week to 1K week. Need advice!
Hi Mozers, I recently changed my URLs for my ecommerce site and my traffic went from 2,000 visitors a week to 1,000 visitors a week, over a 3 week period. Traffic is down, so are unique Kwds. I need advice on why this happened and what I should do moving forward. To brief, I have a ecommerce website, www.ecustomfinishes.com. I noticed pattern that a lot of my URLs with a unique URL structure (URL.Com/ProductDescription/ProductName) were getting a lot of entrances ~30-50 a month, and others that followed the path of my subcategory (URL.com/SubCat/Product) were getting 0-3 entrances a month. The seo pattern was that those with unique product URLs were hitting long tail Kwds, and those URLs with /subcategory/product were getting far less traffic. I changed 150 or so urls to be unique. Good idea, I thought. Since then: CON: Since then my traffic dropped from 2200 visitors a week to 1100 visitors a week. -25% week to week, over 3 weeks CON: # of non-paid keywords sending visits: -25% week to week, over 3 weeks PRO: my Urls receiving entrances +10% week to week, over 3 weeks REF: http://imgur.com/GwZT8 Question: What are your best suggestions moving forward? Any advice is much appreciated, Thank you!!! abBN3
Reporting & Analytics | | longdenc_gmail.com0 -
Google.co.uk (The Web or Pages From UK) Query?
Hi, Google.co.uk is ambiguous at best, it is geo targeted for the UK, however, by default all results incorporate "The Web" meaning outside the UK. If a user wishes to filter to "Pages From UK" then they have to click that specifically. Now my clients regularly ask me whether the traffic they are getting is from Google.co.uk (The Web) or Google.co.uk (Pages from UK) In analytics it combines these two as single source = Google.co.uk without any further breakdown, is there a way to figure this out. If I can split the figures then I can run necessary additional comparisons etc. Regards Ausaf
Reporting & Analytics | | conversiontactics0 -
Correlation between google and yahoo indexed pages
My blog ocpatentlawyer.com has about 130 pages or so. Google has indexed most if not all of the posts and pages. In contrast, yahoo has only indexed about 1/4 of the pages and posts. Are there any actions that can be taken based on this information? For example, if i prepare a blog post should I prepare it so that it will most likely be indexed into yahoo knowing that google will also index it. If so, how can i prepare blog posts that will most likely be indexed into yahoo's index?
Reporting & Analytics | | jamesjd70