Google’s John Mueller cautions against removing content from a website simply because it doesn’t receive a lot of traffic.
As far as Google’s algorithms are concerned, low page views is not an indicator that content is low quality.
Therefore, site owners should not remove web pages due to page views alone.
This topic came up in a recent Google Webmaster Central hangout when the following question was asked:
“What do you consider terrible content? Content which is not getting a lot of visitors because they do not search for that topic at the moment?
A page could be very, very important in terms of information there but maybe it’s not something trendy at the moment. Should I remove such kind of content?”
In response, Mueller says he would not use a metric like page views as the only way of recognizing low-quality content.
Page views is a metric that can assist site owners in identifying low-quality content, but it’s not an automatic indicator that a web page is not valuable.
Google’s algorithms don’t even look at the number of page views. Rather, they try to understand the value a piece of content provides to those who may be searching for it.
This is something most SEOs are already aware of, but clearly it bears repeating every now and then.
Hear the full question and answer in the video below starting at the 46:05 mark:
“I would not use a metric like page views as the only way of recognizing low-quality content. You’re kind of the expert on your website and you know what’s good and what’s bad. Sometimes a metric like page views helps you to find low-quality content, but I would not blindly say “everything that gets few page views is bad content and I need to remove it.”
Our algorithms don’t look at the number of page views, they try to understand the value of the content instead. So just because it’s rarely used doesn’t mean it’s a bad piece of content.”
