Higher Quality Pages Get Higher Quality Traffic Even If Fewer In Number

A lot of people wonder and some of them even accuse Google for kind of manipulating traffic quality. I even read comments that Google are probably responsible for the fabricated AdWords clicks. Well, now these people have something to hold on as Gary Illyes confirmed a fact being dangerously close to actually manipulating traffic quality, but it is up to you to decide who is right and who is wrong.

The discussion started after the Stone Temple Consulting Q&A on YouTube, where Eric Enge explained to Gary Illyes that he removed a big number of low quality pages (around 50% of all pages) from a site, the traffic did not change that much, but on the other hand their conversions and sales increased greatly. Eric was wondering what is the explanation behind this SEO phenomenon. Gary Illyes confirmed that this is quite possible if you remove low quality pages, but here are his exact words for you to consider:

As long as you have more localized pages. it’s natural that you will get better traffic. I mean higher and higher quality traffic from search engines in general. So from that point of view yes. narrow it down as much as you can. Like don’t create low quality and no value ad pages.

It seems that Google considers low quality pages as a waste of resources if you are not getting quality traffic in general.