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8 Comments

Am I Fooling Google?

I have a website where the top 5 landing pages from organic traffic are not directly relevant to my products. Think about it as if I was selling olives but the top 5 landing pages are about pizza. Just happened to have a few older articles rank really really well.

While there still some relation to the site's purpose, and while the site ranks well in relevant keywords (generally around page 1-3), I was wondering if in fact this is interfering with the score somehow. This traffic is quite significant, but gets absolutely 0 revenues over the past couple of years.

Question is, would it be better to leave everything as-is or dump those articles in order to clear the junk around the actual offering?

#marketing

  1. 1

    Check the user experience in Analytics for those articles. If the content is engaging and people stay on site, that's a good quality indicator and may help your site. If visitors quickly bounce, it could be problematic and you may need to improve the content or nuke it. Backlinks to those articles could also indirectly help the overall domain SEO performance.

    1. 1

      @nohaberia - That's exactly the case, perhaps I didn't mention it before - Those pages have a very high bounce rate, meaning people reach those pages from Google and drop right after a couple of minutes..

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        A couple of minutes is not bad at all. Also have in mind that Analytics out of the box does not give accurate time on page for bounces. Short bounces are bad. Long bounces - visitors read for 2++ mins and then leave are a good indicator of engagement.

  2. 1

    I think it is totally ok to have not relevant landing pages. You are the owner of your website, not Google. But don't think they are really useful to sell your product. Moreover they will mess your analytics and make harder to calculate real conversion rate for your traffic.
    I had similar situation on one of my websites and ended up deleting all unrelevant content. Traffic dropped significantly but number of orders didn't

    1. 1

      Thanks! Yeah I'm obviously aware of the distorted analytics figures, but I'm not concerned about that.

      I was concerned that a few not-really-relevant articles would hurt the rank of the site on other keywords or trustflow for example..

      If it's just affecting the analytics, it's perfectly fine

  3. 1

    It's not a problem for SEO. You can keep them if you want.

  4. -1

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    1. 1

      There is no hack, just older articles not necessarily relevant to the current offering.

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