Better for SEO to No-Index Pages with High Bounce Rates

[Kingalan1]

Greeting MOZ Community:

I operate www.nyc-officespace-leader.com, a New York City commercial real estate web site established in 2006. An SEO effort has been ongoing since September 2013 and traffic has dropped about 30% in the last month.

The site has about 650 pages. 350 are listing pages, 150 are building pages. The listing and building pages have an average bounce rate of about 75%. The other 150 pages have a bounce rate of about 35%. The building and listing pages are dragging down click through rates for the entire site. My SEO firm believe there might be a benefit to "no-index, follow" these high bounce rate URLs.

From an SEO perspective, would it be worthwhile to "no-index-follow" most of the building and listing pages in order to reduce the bounce rate? Would Google view the site as a higher quality site if I had these pages de-indexed and the average bounce rate for the site dropped significantly. If I no-indexed these pages would Google provide bette ranking to the pages that already perform well?

As a real estate broker, I will constantly be adding many property listings that do not have much content so it seems that a "no-index, follow" would be good for the listings unless Google penalizes sites that have too many "no-index, follow" pages.

Any thoughts???

Thanks,
Alan

[SamuelScott]

First, I'd address the "human" part of the question: WHY are the bounce rates for those two sets of pages high? Are you targeting the wrong audience via organic and/or paid search? Are the calls-to-action unattractive? Is the design not user-friendly? Does the form have too many fields? Is the text poorly written? There are countless variables to explore and then test via conversion optimization.

The key to online-marketing success is to think about the human visitors first and Google second because Google is trying to become an algorithm that thinks like a human.

Second, Google officially states that bounce rates do not affect rankings and that Google Analytics data is not used. This makes sense because sometimes a high bounce rate is good. Google wants to provide people with the answers they need as soon as possible. If they search Google, come to your website, find the answer, and go elsewhere within a few seconds, then Google would think it was a job well done.

Third, there could be a lot of problems. Your domain, for example, contains keywords and has two hyphens -- and that looks very sketchy to visitors and probably search engines as well. That's a common characteristic of spam sites. I haven't looked at your site, so I don't know. A lot depends on what your "SEO firm" did and has been doing. Too many firms don't really know what they're doing and can do harmful rather than helpful work. Maybe some bad links were built recently. Maybe a lot of keyword stuffing was done lately. Check your Google Webmaster Tools to see if you've got any penalty messages from Google.

Also, this is a busy time of year for properties and rentals (the summer) so maybe your competitors are going big on PPC ads so that there are fewer organic clicks in general.

One final note: I'd never no-index large portions of a website. I'd think that would be a big red flag to Google that the site is trying to hide something.

Hope that helps!

[Kingalan1]

Hi Samuel:

Thanks so much for taking the time to respond to my post!!

You make an excellent point about the necessity to create content useful for humans rather than search engines, a position my SEO firm has also taken.

My site has received no manual penalty from Google. Besides launching an upgraded version that made mostly cosmetic changes, not much has changed on the site since February.

But I should mention that in late April a link removal requests were made to about 100 toxic domains. About 30 web masters voluntarily removed their links. In mid May we filed a disavow request with Google for the other 70 domains. Could the removal of these links and the disavowal request have something to do with the fall in ranking and traffic? Please note the site only had about 280 domains linking to it in March and now there are even less. The quality of the incoming domains was pretty poor.

Good suggestion regarding adding no-follows to the poorly performing building and listing pages. But we have a bit of a challenge with listing pages. They get rented quickly and it becomes unfeasible to add them to the site, and they are absolutely essential, if we need to add 300-400 words of content and write title and description tags. So how would you suggest we manage listings if we should not "no-index" them?

Regarding our potentially spammy domain, we have used it for the site since 2006.  An alternative domain (www.metro-manhattan.com) exists that redirects to our primary domain (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com). Do you think it would be better to redirect the site to the www.metro-manhattan.com domain? It better matches the brand "Metro Manhattan Office Space". But I have heard domain changes can be dangerous nightmares.

You point out a potential issue with dashed in our domain. Do you think the single dash in Metro-Manhattan.com would also appear spammy?  Incidentally, I don't think the content on our site looks spammy at all, maybe there is some thin content but not spammy.

Thanks for your assistance!!! Alan