John Mueller from Google has answered questions about how to identify pages to remove or block. He mainly clarified that even the low traffic pages are okay but low-quality ones are not.
In a Google Webmaster Hangout, Google’s John Mueller answered. Which low traffic pages to no index and which ones to not concerned about.
Are These Low Traffic Pages Unsafe?
It’s a million-dollar question that it’s better to remove the pages that are performing low in their index area. Low-quality pages are used to attract less audience. That is what makes the page harmful for a site or company. Google suggests removing the pages that have low-quality content and maybe no indexing, those pages should remove immediately.
That’s what the major concern and query John Mueller answered about.
This is the Question Being Asked to Him:
“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?”
What Mueller Said:
“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.”
Now Mueller attentions on news sites.
He states that “traffic isn’t necessarily the metric to use for judging whether a news web page is a low quality.”
What Mueller Said:
“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 is 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.”
He even highlighted an issue that Google used to remove content that is breaking, hard to read, manipulative, and majorly targeting the low audience. Poorly structured content will lead to harmful effects on your site.
Does Poor and Good Content Will Down Your Site Traffic?
Even to a question that if sites contain a mixture of bad and good content what perspectives would be in the line. In that regard he said that;
“On the other hand, if you’re publishing articles from … hundreds of different authors and they’re from the 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. Google can recognize, this is really what I want to be known for.”
Concerns relative to publishing a mixture of content make Google doomy as well. Because Google will predict what sort of agency you’re in and what type of content you’re writing for.
Content matters? Yes!
Content matters because it’s a fact that many companies are using it as a frontline weapon to grab a huge audience. Google as a search engine will publish the content on the basis that they are working with these people and that’s what Mueller has added in his statement. He stated that;
“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 no index on these, or maybe I’ll initially put no index 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.
Reasons:
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. Because it’s not low-quality content. It’s just less popular content.”
If a page does not receive a high-level targeted audience, there is a moment at which it is no longer relevant. It does not mean they have low quality. There can be a mixture of things that will lead to less traffic on the page and they might be following;
- The webpage information and resources are outdated and not up-to-date.
- Web pages do not look good or friendly to use.
- Web pages are covering domains that are not on a popular or on-trend scale.
So, the facts and figures remain unusual if we do not follow the measures given. And advised by seniors or authorities. Google as a search engine will not hesitate to remove any index. And poor quality content will make a bad point on your site’s reputation. That’s what exactly you will not want to see.
