Should I index news and blog posts which receive little traffic

[Deniz]

Hi all,

I have a very large site at the moment with a handful of high authority pages with great content which describe the charity's work.

But the main content on the site is blogs and news article which, while being good quality content from a reader's point of view, receive little traffic from search engines as they are so niche and long-tail.

They do, however, get ok internal traffic from other pages.

Should these pages be indexed still or should I remove them? Is there a rule of thumb regarding minimum clicks/bounce rates that an indexed page should have?

What do big news agencies do with really niche articles that may get next to no traffic but have valuable content on for those that do click through?

Thanks in advance!

Den

[TomRayner]

Hi Den

Your analytics data, so your traffic, bounce rate, dwell time etc. are not ranking factors - Google is quite explicit on this.  The exception being site speed.

Therefore, there's no problem keeping these pages indexed, even if they receive little to no external traffic.  Furthermore, I'd keep them for the long-tail reason - you never know when that long-tail may pick up some converting traffic.  You may as well leave it out there as it's not hurting anyone, especially not your site.

Hope this helps!

[Deniz]

Thanks Tom - that was what I was hoping!

Am I right in thinking the main things to un-index are:

• Internal SERP pages
• Internal category pages (eg http://www.merlin.org.uk/category/floods)
• Duplicate pages from pagination etc

All the best and many thanks.