An interesting question came up in the Google hangout from last Friday. A webmaster asked, can you assume that if Google is not sending traffic to you from a certain page, that Google deems the page to be low quality and you should thus remove that page from your web site or block Google from crawling it.
Asked another way - we know SEOs are obsessed about making sure every single page on their web site is high quality. With PageRank not being a reliable source of that information, can you use Google referrals as an indicator?
John Mueller from Google answered that question at the 3:35 mark into the video. John said:
Using just the traffic from search as an indicator for the quality of your web site might work sometimes but I wouldn’t say this is the main way you should be looking at the quality of your content.Because otherwise if you start with a new website, it does;’t get any traffic from search, you can’t no index everything because it doesn’t get any traffic.
I think sometimes it helps to look at the pages that doesn’t get traffic but I wouldn’t assume that you need to remove those pages just because it doesn’t have traffic. Maybe people rarely look for it and that’s perfectly fine.
Here is the video:
The way John answered the question was pretty much expected. Honestly, I am surprised to see him say it may be something you might want to look at but he does lay heavily on - you shouldn't use this as your sole metric. Either way, interesting to see him answer that.
Forum discussion at Google+.
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