Low Traffic May Not Always Mean Low Quality

Are you in charge of a page that has little visibility and low traffic? What can be the possible reasons? Do you think there are some hidden problems with the quality of your page?

John Mueller, the Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, recently stated that having low traffic doesn’t always mean that the concerned page is of inferior quality in a YouTube interview (you can find the comment at the 40-minute mark).

There are innumerable pages that are recorded to have low visibility and that the sites lack authority. The possible solutions can be to re-index data or convert it into more than one representation in standard, normal and canonical form (canonicalization). 

When it Comes to Organic Search, Google Doesn’t Have a Quality Score.

There are many people in the search industry, including Google, who address site quality. Indeed, the low-quality web pages, sites, and other online pages and groups are assessed. However, Google doesn’t possess any feature of maintaining the quality score of a page. 

In this context, John Mueller mentioned that Google does not have a quality score, but it automatically comes from advertisements.

Therefore, a person must take note of this as it may determine the page’s quality score. If you are thinking about improving the quality of a page then, you can always remove some pages and there are always options for improvement. You can create something interesting by integrating the pages. 

Low Traffic Doesn’t Necessarily Mean Low Quality

In the words of John Mueller,

“If these are pages that tend not to get a lot of traffic, but they’re useful on their own, then I wouldn’t necessarily see them as low quality. That’s one thing to keep in mind.” 

Search exposure has its significance, but low traffic isn’t always a sign of contributing your efforts to an inferior quality page. Sometimes pages that attract low traffic are of poor quality.

However, in other cases, the head and the tail pages attract a smaller audience because it might be helpful for them. Long story short, every website is valuable, and content shouldn’t be removed based on traffic quality. 

You can always opt for improving the quality of your pages by making suggestive changes. Combining pages using a canonical can be a good option. However, Google will then accept only the canonical page. Hence, make your page bigger and stronger. 

Identifying Issues Related to Quality and Traffic 

The question incorporates two topics: content quality and search traffic. If the content quality is exceptional, it is better to create a new composition by amalgamating the weaker pages. But, if the content is ineffectual and worthless, it is better to rewrite and present something more advantageous.

Also, redirect it to a page that contains similar or better topics. That can be potentially beneficial for your page.