Effects of Removing Most-Visited/Most-Linked Page on site?

[EvilSaint]

Hi Guys,

I'm caught up in a debate at the moment. There is a page on our website which is the most visited page on our website because the contents of the page form a guide which people find useful.

Trouble is, this page results in a very high bounce rate because people come to this page, view the contents of the guide and leave. They dont venture to any of the deeper content or any other content within the site. Having said that, the people who do visit can also be return visitors because they come back to the same page again after it updates.

This guide page also happens to be the most linked page on our site.

The business is of the opinion that this page is too costly to maintain and update daily and needs to go. The cost savings will then be diverted to other areas of the site to beef them up.

From an SEO perspective I can already see this as a disaster waiting to happen...

The page is well indexed, ranks really well, has a lot of link value.

How can I convince the stakeholders that this is a bad move? Are there any other major effects apart from ranking and traffic loss that I've not accounted for?

Also, anyone of the opinion that its not such a bad thing that this page goes?

Would love to hear your thoughts...

[onepointone]

this page is too costly to maintain and update daily and needs to go

That might be a clue as to why this page is so popular.
Maybe no other websites want to take the time, effort and money to supply similar information?

Are the pages the others want to 'beef up' straight content pages that won't be updated much?

So much of the web is just information (valid information yes) that is just regurgitated a 100 other places.

I think the web in general has devalued content to a great degree. People talk about having 'evergreen' content. I think most of the content on the web is 'everbrown'.

[EvilSaint]

Are the pages the others want to 'beef up' straight content pages that won't be updated much?

Yes OnePointOne, the beefed up content pages wont be updated much and will not have any of the content that is currently on this page that is due to be shutdown.

I agree with your sentiments about the 'everbrown' content...

[onepointone]

Yeah, I'd try to leverage or monetize the page to the hilt, before I'd take it down.

[Rasputin]

This sounds like a business decision (good) so the answer depends on the real cost of keeping the page updated (cost of staff time, cost of obtaining the information on the page etc) compared with the value gained from the page(direct income generated from the page, financial value of the links it brings to the site as a whole, increase in brand awareness from having a popular page etc).

You then need to think about whether there are better ways to monetise the page (will people pay a subscription to see it? or to advertise on it?)

Your challenge is to attribute financial values to all these variables - then compare that with the alternative, if the page was removed. Without at least taking a view on that information it is not possible to make a balanced decision about whether to keep the page.

(Generally on balance I would keep a very popular page, for site and brand awareness reasons, unless it was clearly disproportionately expensive to keep.)

[deadsea]

If a page gets links, the linkbait aspect of it can be worth quite a bit. Here would be my stab at valuation:

1) Get the number of unique domains that link to your site
2) Get the number of unique domains that link to that page
3) Based on these two numbers determine the percent of unique domains linking into your site for which the page is responsible
4) Ask if anybody would be willing to risk that percent of revenue from SEO traffic.

Another way to approach it:
To me, a new editorial link from unique domain is worth about $500. Another way to value the effort that you could put into the page is the rate at which it is getting such links.

As others have pointed out, it is a business decision. Determine (in dollars) what the page is worth to SEO and let the business leaders make the business decision.

[indyank]

It depends on how relevant the guide is to the site.

If there is a corresponding page that could convert, I would be linking the guide to that page at a very prominent location. I would also consider using banners on the guide that would entice users to click through to the converting page.

This guide page also happens to be the most linked page on our site.

I am assuming that it is so because of its relevance to the overall theme of the site.If that be the case, do everything to improve user interaction. But do not focus on just one user metric i.e. bounce.

The business is of the opinion that this page is too costly to maintain and update daily and needs to go.

I am not sure why a guide would undergo daily updation.

The business is of the opinion that this page is too costly to maintain and update daily and needs to go. The cost savings will then be diverted to other areas of the site to beef them up.

I don't know what kind of costs are involved, but have they worked out both the tangible and intangible benefits?

Given the fact that user satisfaction is a key metric for a website's success, I wouldn't want to make a decision by considering only the tangible benefits to which you can assign financial values.

[edited by: indyank at 4:07 pm (utc) on Aug 23, 2011]

[Planet13]

If there is a corresponding page that could covert, I would be linking the guide to that page at a very prominent location. I would also consider using banners on the guide that would entice users to click through to the converting page.

This has helped one of my money pages rank significantly higher in the SERPs. I link to it in the first paragraph of content on the popular page. In fact it is the first in-content text link on that page.

It sounds like they really have a unique product (i.e., the information they provide) and that there must be SOME way to monetize it they just haven't thought of yet.

[pageoneresults]

Trouble is, this page results in a very high bounce rate because people come to this page, view the contents of the guide and leave. They don't venture to any of the deeper content or any other content within the site.

Sounds like the guide needs to be segmented into additional documents.

Having said that, the people who do visit can also be return visitors because they come back to the same page again after it updates.

Ah, fresh content that is actually updated by humans. That's a rarity these days. ;)

This guide page also happens to be the most linked page on our site.

It is THE most important page of the site - more important than the home page.

The business is of the opinion that this page is too costly to maintain and update daily and needs to go. The cost savings will then be diverted to other areas of the site to beef them up.

This page sounds like it is really the home page of your site for many of your visitors. How costly can the most important page of the site be to maintain? Does it have to be done daily? Are those updates done somewhere else internally? Can that process be extended to update the content on the site?

From an SEO perspective I can already see this as a disaster waiting to happen.

It could well be one of the worst decisions made. If anything, all of the efforts need to be focused on that one page since it is the true home page for your visitors. The high bounce rate can be minimized by breaking the content up into multiple documents and including links to additional content from there.

The high bounce rate is not a bad thing in many instances, especially when dealing with documents that serve the answer quickly with no need for the visitor to drill down further. In fact, I think those high bounce rates can work for you. I've had documents that had very high bounce rates and they performed extremely well for years - they still do. When you serve an answer to a query within seconds of the visitor landing on the page and they go back, that can be a good thing overall. Google understands that type of high bounce rate behavior.

Now you need to figure out how to take them one step further. Are these folks really candidates for conversion? Or is this strictly an "answers" environment and the chance of conversion is minimal?

[netmeg]

This type of page (with the bounce rate and the returning visitors) is basically my operating model for a few of my high traffic sites. I worked on making it easier to keep updated rather than try to sabotage what I've got going for me. Then I worked on making sure that there were calls to action for my other pages, so that they knew there was more to the site if they chose to invest the time in it.

It's worked out extremely well for me so far.

[EvilSaint]

Thank you all for your input, thoughts and comments...

@Rasputin - Monetisation is definitely a challenge for this page. Subscribers will not be willing to pay to see the content as it is available from multiple sources...albeit in a disjointed state. The difference is that our page collates it all from the different sources and displays it.

@Deadsea - Definitely like your model and will work out the numbers to see what we can deem to be the "value" of that page

@Indyrank - The content on the source sites changes daily and we need to get all that content and collate it daily for display.

@Planet13 @netmeg @pageoneresults
Definitely haven't found a way to leverage this page and its unique offering yet. I guess the focus needs to be on innovation - figuring out a strategy to best utilize the assets of this page rather than killing it off.
Definitely need to pull the spotlight away from the bounce rate and focus on the visits/links aspect of it.
Will try and think of how we can link other content pages from this page appropriately to see if it makes a difference perhaps.

Thanks for all the help :)

[netmeg]

Subscribers will not be willing to pay to see the content as it is available from multiple sources...albeit in a disjointed state. The difference is that our page collates it all from the different sources and displays it.

Exactly my situation for a few sites. I started out monetizing it with AdSense, and as traffic grew and grew, was eventually able to market direct advertising on the page to people/companies who were trying to reach the same audience (but not competition with me). Now it's a combination of AdSense and direct ads. Am currently weighing an offer to "sponsor" the page in exchange for a single exclusive ad.

The point is, don't look to the subscribers, look for other people who want to reach the same audience.

That's one way to get more out of it.