In the world of digital marketing, it is very important that your web page should perform well. Therefore, it is mostly recommended to remove the web pages that are not performing well as they do not attract a large amount of traffic and offer no usefulness in improving the performance of the website.
For improvising the website quality, sometimes content pruning is used. It is a concept in which a webmaster examines such pages that are receiving a low amount of traffic and prunes them. It is done to improve the health and performance of the webpage.
But still, our question “Are Low Performing Pages Bad for SEO”? is unanswered. So let’s dive into the sea of SEO to get a better understanding and answer to this question.
What Does 'Quality' Mean In Google?
If you have to improve your web page’s performance, then it is useful that you should know the analysis process of Google.
You should keep yourself familiar with the new updates that Google delivers on a regular basis. It will help you in knowing the right process to improve the performance of your website.
Google follows some of the factors to differentiate the low quality and high-quality content. From which you might be familiar with some of them.
Google demands unique content so that users can find the most relevant information as per their search query. No duplicate, copied and thin content should be used on a website. You can use content marketing tools to upgrade your website content.
Does Analysis Of Your Content
It is a good practice to analyze your content on a self basis. Google’s John Mueller has also pointed towards this fact while addressing the issue of low traffic on some web pages. John was asked the question from a news-based website, but his answer is global to every web page. The question was somehow like this–
Question by Publisher“
We’re publishing news and articles. For example, we have 100 new articles every day, and ten of them give us 95% of the organic search traffic. Another 90 go nowhere. We’re afraid that Google can decide our website is interesting only for 10%. There’s an idea to hide some boring local news under a no-index tag to make the overall quality of all publishing content better. What do you think?”
In response, Mueller gives details on how the Google algorithm examines every webpage and website to prepare its report.
The answer was–
“In general, we do look at the content on a per-page basis. And we also try to understand the site on an overall basis, to understand how well is this site working, is this something that users appreciate if everything is essentially working the way that it should be working. So it’s not completely out of the question to think about all of your content and think about what you really want to have indexed.” He stated that judging a webpage solely on the traffic it receives is not the right metric to consider a page as low quality.
Further, he added-
“But especially with a news website, it seems pretty normal that you’d have a lot of articles that are interesting for a short period of time, that are perhaps more of a snapshot from a day-to-day basis for a local area. And it’s kind of normal that they don’t become big, popular stories on your website. So from that point of view, I wouldn’t necessarily call those articles low-quality articles, for example.”
Also, he explained that if any news article is not so popular, then it doesn’t imply that its quality is low. John Mueller explained several factors besides content that are responsible for determining the quality of the article. He offered a solution for such web pages that are hard to understand by users and have poorly structured content that causes a bad impression on users.
Mueller’s Wording
“On the other hand, if you’re publishing articles from hundreds of different authors and they’re of varying quality, and some of them are really bad, they’re kind of hard to read, they’re structured in a bad way, and their English is broken. And some of them are really high-quality pieces of art, almost that you’re providing. Then creating that kind of a mix on a website makes it really hard for Google and for users to understand that actually, you do have a lot of gems on your website…
So that’s the situation where I would go in and say, we need to provide some kind of quality filtering or some kind of quality bar ahead of time so that users and Google can recognize; this is really what I want to be known for.
And these are all things, maybe user-submitted content, that is something we’re publishing because we’re working with these people, but it’s not what we want to be known for. Then that’s the situation where you might say, maybe I’ll put noindex on these, or maybe I’ll initially put noindex on these until I see that actually, they’re doing really well.
So for that, I would see it making sense that you provide some kind of quality filtering. But if it’s a news website, where… by definition, you have a variety of different articles, they’re all well-written, they’re reasonable, just the topics aren’t that interesting for the long run, that’s kind of normal.
That’s not something where I’d say you need to block that from being indexed. But, again, because it’s not low-quality content, it’s just less popular content.”
He beautifully explained some considerable points to evaluate the quality of the article
Why Do Some Of The Web Pages Perform Low?
It is useful for website owners to know which of their web pages are performing low and what is the reason behind them.
There are some reasons associated with the low traffic of the webpage.
- Information On The Web Page Is Outdated
We all experience such times when things need to be changed, and the same occurs with content. Content on your webpage becomes outdated or old with growing time. It is not good for the performance of your webpage that it remains with obsolete or incorrect data. If readers do not get useful information on your webpage, then they will not return back. So it is quite easy to fix these issues to deliver a better user experience and get a good performing webpage. The information on your webpage should be up to date, accurate and relevant to the readers.
- Thin Content On Web Page
If you have thin content on a web page that is not performing well, then it implies that the quality of the content is not good. Such type of content does not provide any information to the users. It only degrades the user’s experience. Google also considers such web pages as the signal of low quality and stops ranking them. Thus if you have thin content web pages, then try adding more content or remove that web pages. Marketing Sweet – where real-world data & science meets breathtaking web design. If do you want to build a new website for your online business, you can contact our highly skilled Adelaide’s web designers to get the attractive webpage for users.
- Topic Of The Webpage Is Not In Demand
When we talk about the low performance of the webpage, then it may be the case that the quality of content is high, but the selected keyword is not in demand and popular. Traffic is not the right metric to determine the quality of web pages. You should check your competitor’s website on which topic they are targeting and what traffic they are receiving.If you want to establish a new website for your online business, you can get in touch with our highly trained Adelaide web designers to create an attractive webpage for users.
So What Is The Solution?
Whatever we have seen so far gives us the idea that Google’s primary concern is not related to the content pruning process. Of course, you need to give priority to good quality content to improve its performance. But you should also consider other attributes that are related to the webpage performance.
If you are not able to identify the problem related to the low performing pages, then you can take advice from Marketing Sweet professionals. We have well-trained and experienced seo specialists in Adelaide with us that work according to the demand and requirements of the clients. You will enjoy more traffic, leads, and conversion with Marketing Sweet professionals.
Feel free to share your queries with us at 08 8337 4340.
