Low Traffic cannot be equated with Low Quality in Google

Previously, John Mueller has answered queries regarding pages with low traffic and poor visibility in the search engine. On this occasion, he has said that the page may have quality issues. However, it does not mean the page is of low quality completely.

On the occasion, John Mueller has been asked “We have a site that has a hub and spoke architecture. A hub page might be Eric Clapton and the spokes are what guitars he uses, and each of those pages are relatively small. The value from them is from embedded videos or pictures with relatively little unique font content. Over time those pages have become the majority of our indexed pages, with well over a hundred thousand. But only a third of those are getting traffic through search. In the past I’ve heard you say that to affect your website’s quality score, we were considering de-indexing those pages … the pages that are not getting traffic… However, we were also considering canonicalizing these. So I was curious how Google would treat that from a quality score perspective.”

Quality Score may not be seen in Google for Organic Search

Site quality is often discussed by the experts in the search industry. Either a web page or a collection of webpage and even an entire website can be considered low in term of quality. However, quality score may not be noticed with the organic search. It is a point that has been affirmed by John Mueller also.

Addressing the question on quality, John Mueller has said that Google does not offer any quality score.

Mueller has said “We don’t really have a quality score, in that sense. I think that’s something that comes from the ad side. So that’s one thing to keep in mind there”

Dealing with low quality web pages

Giving solution for low quality web pages, Mueller has talked about different approaches. He has said
“I think there are multiple things to think about here. On the one hand, I would consider taking some action if you feel that these pages are low quality. Taking action could be something like removing those pages, improving those pages, combining those kinds of pages together. Anything along those lines could be something that you could do if these are low quality pages.”

Low Traffic may not mean low quality

Giving some insight about low search visibility, it has been said that lesser traffic is not a sign of low quality.

Mueller has said
“If these are pages that tend not to get a lot of traffic but they’re actually useful on their own then I wouldn’t necessarily see them as low quality. That’s one thing to keep in mind. On some websites, pages that get low traffic are often almost like correlated with low quality as well but that doesn’t have to be the case. On other websites it might must just be that a lot of traffic goes to the head pages and the tail pages are just as useful but they’re useful for a much smaller audience. So they get barely any traffic. From our point of view, those websites are still useful and it’s still high quality. I wouldn’t remove it just because it doesn’t get traffic.”

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