One SEO professional asked John during the submitted Question and Answer portion of his hangout about low quality content.
They were looking to prune some content on their site. Their question: Weak traffic being one of the criteria, what would you (John) consider to be the minimum acceptable level of traffic to keep an article?
John explained that he thinks it’s not a great idea to attribute low traffic to a page to the page being a good – or a bad – page.
It’s just natural for some pages to not get a lot of traffic, but they could still be extremely important.
For example: if you’re selling Christmas trees, then you would want to have those pages visible in the search results for December.
If you look at January, or March, and you examine the traffic to your pages, and you say “Eeew. These Christmas trees are terrible – I should delete all my Christmas tree pages.”
That’s not the right thing to do there.
Even though they are seasonal, these pages could be relevant at some point in the future.
Similarly, other types of pages on a website may get very little traffic, but they could be very very good pages.
They may also be very important pieces of information on the web overall.
Just purely going in and saying, at this level of traffic – I’m going to delete everything on my website – is not something that makes sense.
This happens at approximately the 37:43 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (Submitted Question) 37:43
I’m looking at pruning some content on my site. Weak traffic being one of the criteria, would you consider the minimum—or what would you consider the minimum acceptable level of traffic to keep an article?
John (Answer) 37:56
So I don’t think just purely going off and looking at the traffic to a page is enough reason to say this is a good page or a bad page. Some pages just don’t get a lot of traffic, but are extremely important. For example, I don’t know if you’re selling Christmas trees, then you probably expect those pages to be kind of visible in the search results in December.
So if you look in January, or March, and you look at the traffic to your pages, and you’ll say, Oh, well, these Christmas trees are terrible, like I should just delete all my Christmas tree pages. But that’s not, that’s not really the right thing to do there. I mean, these pages will be relevant at some point in the future. And similarly, other kinds of pages on your website might get very little traffic, but they might be really good pages.
And they might be really important pieces of information on the web overall. So just purely going in and saying, at this level of traffic, I will delete everything from my website. I don’t think that makes sense. As a way of kind of like fine tuning what you want to focus on, and then manually going through and saying, Well, this is good, this is bad. That’s perfectly fine. But just blindly saying everything below this traffic level is bad and I’ll delete it, I don’t think that makes sense. So I would not recommend doing that.
