Will redirecting poor traffic web pages increase web presence
-
A number of pages on my site have low traffic metrics. I intend to redirect poor performing pages to the most appropriate page with high traffic.
Example
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-greyshoes
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-greenshoes
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-redshoesall of the above will be redirected to the following page:
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/high-traffic-blackshoesQuestion
Will carrying out htaccess redirects from the above example influence to web positioning of both www.sampledomomain.co.uk/high-traffic-blackshoes and www.sampledomomain.co.ukRegards Mark
-
Hi Mark,
I would say that there will be negligible results in redirecting these pages unless they happen to have a high number of good inbound links from other sources. Redirecting the individual pages alone is unlikely to make a huge difference to the authority / strength / rankings of the high-traffic pages you redirect to or the domain itself.
If you were to do this, I would do it with usability in mind. Do people arriving on the low traffic pages regularly bounce? Do you believe that they would be more likely to convert if they arrived on the high traffic page? I am not a CRO expert so would stop short of making CRO testing advice.
The one SEO benefit I can think of would be if those low-traffic pages are contributing to any duplicate content issues on your site and redirecting them would count as "cleaning up" the site. This is definitely not for sure, so I'd still stick with the mindset that you'd be doing this for the purpose of directing traffic, not search engines.
I hope this helps.
Jane
-
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.
-
Dear Devanur,
Thank you for your response.
To date i have checked both Google Analytics, Keyword Planner, and live running Google Adwords Campaign. All have not yielded favourable traffic. Please bear in mind the low traffic examples stated previously have no bearing to my actual low traffic pages. However, I have seen almost 99.5% of customers hitting my high traffic page.
With this in mind, I cannot see any way that even to incentivise customers (based on your model) that any additional traffic can be found.
Therefore, would redirecting my low traffic pages still be beneficial?
Regards Mark
-
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
-
Thank you Chris you your response.
The example provided was an over simplified scenario.
In reality, I will be driving the users to a high traffic page that has relevance. Additionally, users would seldom search for the low traffic pages and therefore by removing these from Google's index won't make them appear in the search. Within the high traffic page, I will give the user the experience and information on all low traffic content.
Please give your thoughts.
Regards Mark
-
if a user wants green shoes and goes to
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-greenshoes
but in fact then gets a page about black shoes what do you think they will do ?
I would think they would bounce and then turn your high traffic page to a low traffic page. It may make more sense to not try to trick users into going to pages, Google doesn't like tricks either.
If in doubt ignore SEO and look at it from a user point of view as that's what Google wants, it wants the best for a user. if you go to a site and you're redirected all over the place it doesn't make for a pleasant experience.
In Short, redirecting pages won't help in a longer term for SEO, making a good site for user experience with good content will help. Look at other ways to promote those pages, e.g make a review of a product on the page etc.
Hope that helps a bit.
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
-
Validated pages on GSC displays 5x more pages than when performing site:domain.com?
Hi mozzers, When checking the coverage report on GSC I am seeing over 649,000 valid pages https://cl.ly/ae46ec25f494 but when performing site:domain.com I am only seeing 130,000 pages. Which one is more the source of truth especially I have checked some of these "valid" pages and noticed they're not even indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ty19860 -
How do I get the sub-domain traffic to count as sub-directory traffic without moving off of WordPress?
I want as much traffic as possible to my main site, but right now my blog lives on a blog.brand.com URL rather than brand.com/blog. What are some good solutions for getting that traffic to count as traffic to my main site if my blog is hosted on WordPress? Can I just create a sub-directory page and add a rel canonical to the blog post?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | johnnybgunn0 -
Going from 302 redirect to 301 redirect weeks after changing URL structure
I made a small change on an ecommerce site that had big impacts I didn't consider... About six weeks ago in an effort to clean up one of many SEO-related problems on an ecommerce site, I had a developer rewrite the URLs to replace underscores with hyphens and redirect all pages throughout the site to that page with the new URL structure. We didn't immediately update our sitemap to reflect the changes (bad!) and I just discovered all the redirects are 302s... Since these changes, most of the pages have a page authority of 1 and we have dropped several spots in organic search. If we were to setup 301 redirects for the pages that we changed the URL structure would there be any changes in organic search placement and page authority or is it too late?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nobody16116990439410 -
301 redirects
One of our employees took an SEO class recently. She was told that having too many 301 redirects can hurt SEO. I have never heard of 301 redirects as having a negative impact. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Smart_Start0 -
Redirect old "not found" url (at http) to new corresponding page (now at https)
My least favorite part of SEO 😉 I'm trying to redirect an old url that no longer exists to our new website that is built with https. The old url: http://www.thinworks.com/palm-beach-gardens-team/ New url: https://www.thinworks.com/palm-beach-gardens/ This isn't working with my standard process of the quick redirection plugin in WP or through htaccess because the old site url is at http and not https. Any help would be much appreciated! How do I accomplish this, where do I do it and what's the code I'd use? Thank you Moz community! Ricky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SUCCESSagency0 -
Ranking slipped to page 6 from page 1 over the weekend?
My site has been on page one for 2 phrases consistently from May onwards this year. The site has fewer than 100 backlinks and the link profile looks fairly even. On Friday we were on page 1, we even had a position 1, however now we are on page 6. Do you think this is Penguin or some strange Google blip? We have no webmaster tools messages at all. Thanks for any help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinechester0 -
What happens when I redirect an entire site to an established page on another site?
Hi There, I have a website which is dedicated to selling ONE product (in different forms) or my main brand site. It is branded similarly, targets similar keywords, and gets some traffic which convert to leads. Additionally, the auxiliary site has a Google Rank 2 in its own right. I am thinking of consolidating this "auxillary" site to the specific product page on my main site. The reason I am considering doing this is to give a "boost" to the main product page on our main site which has many core keywords sitting with SERP ranking of between 11-20 (so not in first 10) Because this auxiliary site it gets traffic and leads in its own right, I don't want this to be to the detriment of my leads overall. Question is - if I 301 redirect the entire domain from my auxillary site to the equivalent product on my main site am I likely to see a large "boost" to that product page? (i.e. will I likely see my ranking rise from 11 - 20 significantly)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | love-seo-goodness0 -
Duplicate page content and Duplicate page title errors
Hi, I'm new to SeoMoz and to this forum. I've started a new campaign on my site and got back loads of error. Most of them are Duplicate page content and Duplicate page title errors. I know I have some duplicate titles but I don't have any duplicate content. I'm not a web developer and not so expert but I have the impression that the crawler is following all my internal links (Infact I have also plenty of warnings saying "Too many on-page links". Do you think this is the cause of my errors? Should I implement the nofollow on all internal links? I'm working with Joomla. Thanks a lot for your help Marco
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marcodublin0