Will redirecting poor traffic web pages increase web presence

[Mark_Ch]

A number of pages on my site have low traffic metrics. I intend to redirect poor performing pages to the most appropriate page with high traffic.

Example
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-greyshoes
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-greenshoes
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-redshoes

all of the above will be redirected to the following page:
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/high-traffic-blackshoes

Question
Will carrying out htaccess redirects from the above example influence to web positioning of both www.sampledomomain.co.uk/high-traffic-blackshoes and www.sampledomomain.co.uk

Regards Mark

[JaneCopland]

Hi Mark,

I would say that there will be negligible results in redirecting these pages unless they happen to have a high number of good inbound links from other sources. Redirecting the individual pages alone is unlikely to make a huge difference to the authority / strength / rankings of the high-traffic pages you redirect to or the domain itself.

If you were to do this, I would do it with usability in mind. Do people arriving on the low traffic pages regularly bounce? Do you believe that they would be more likely to convert if they arrived on the high traffic page? I am not a CRO expert so would stop short of making CRO testing advice.

The one SEO benefit I can think of would be if those low-traffic pages are contributing to any duplicate content issues on your site and redirecting them would count as "cleaning up" the site. This is definitely not for sure, so I'd still stick with the mindset that you'd be doing this for the purpose of directing traffic, not search engines.

I hope this helps.

Jane

[Devanur-Rafi]

No problem my friend and thanks for the information.

I still do not favor the idea of redirecting the low traffic pages to the high traffic ones.

Instead of doing it, you can run a banner kind of thing that apprises the visitors on the low traffic pages about the products (the pages that receive high traffic) that drive most of the traffic. Display a message with a link to the high traffic pages prominently so that they can access those pages from the low traffic pages themselves.Something like, "You might want to check out our all time bestseller or hot product". You can add a button or some kind of call to action when clicked upon will take the visitor to the page that you want to.

Redirecting bunch of pages will bring down the size of the website in the search engine index and you don't want that to happen.

Please feel free to write post back Mark.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

[Mark_Ch]

Dear Devanur,

Thank you for your response.

To date i have checked both Google Analytics, Keyword Planner, and live running Google Adwords Campaign. All have not yielded favourable traffic. Please bear in mind the low traffic examples stated previously have no bearing to my actual low traffic pages. However, I have seen almost 99.5% of customers hitting my high traffic page.

With this in mind, I cannot see any way that even to incentivise customers (based on your model) that any additional traffic can be found.

Therefore, would redirecting my low traffic pages still be beneficial?

Regards Mark

[Devanur-Rafi]

Agree with Chris. Redirecting low traffic pages to their high traffic counterparts is not a solution here for all the reasons mentioned by Chris. First of all, please do a thorough keyword research to find out if there is sizeable search volume for the keywords/phrases that are being targeted by the low traffic pages. It is quite possible that the phrase, 'black shoes' has higher search volume than any other colored shoes and that is the reason for that page to attract and drive good traffic.

Let me quote a situation here that we faced in the past. We had two products, one with a healthy search volume from local geography and the other had very low search volume. Except in few ways, the second product was as good as the first one. So we decided to create market for it as it lacked one here. We threw some freebies and ran a contest on our website and on social media platforms. This not only created awareness about the second product but also increased sales dramatically. Slowly, over a period of time, the search volumes for this product shot up which made us jumping with joy. Though this situation does not directly relate to your issue at hand, but just wanted to convey that, because something does not convert well, we should not drop our efforts to create more and more awareness about the product. Sometimes, adding in few extras with it might change the game for you. Just my two cents.

Wish you good luck my friend.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

[Mark_Ch]

Thank you Chris you your response.

The example provided was an over simplified scenario.

In reality, I will be driving the users to a high traffic page that has relevance. Additionally, users would seldom search for the low traffic pages and therefore by removing these from Google's index won't make them appear in the search. Within the high traffic page, I will give the user the experience and information on all low traffic content.

Please give your thoughts.

Regards Mark

[GPainter]

if a user wants green shoes and goes to

www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-greenshoes

but in fact then gets a page about black shoes what do you think they will do ?

I would think they would bounce and then turn your high traffic page to a low traffic page.  It may make more sense to not try to trick users into going to pages, Google doesn't like tricks either.

If in doubt ignore SEO and look at it from a user point of view as that's what Google wants, it wants the best for a user. if you go to a site and you're redirected all over the place it doesn't make for a pleasant experience.

In Short, redirecting pages won't help in a longer term for SEO, making a good site for user experience with good content will help. Look at other ways to promote those pages, e.g make a review of a product on the page etc.

Hope that helps a bit.