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Is there anything called "bad traffic" in SEO?

by Mehdi Silavi
7 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Is there anything called "bad traffic" in SEO? Our large website has many pages with high bounce rate and low performance on very long tail keywords, ranking in the first page of Google. Do these pages affect our entire website SEO badly? If so why they are ranked in Google?
#bad traffic #called #seo
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  • Profile picture of the author davidlee210
    Bad traffic refers to irrelevant traffic. Due to higher bounce rate after a while the seo rank will decrease .
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    • Profile picture of the author dave_hermansen
      Originally Posted by davidlee210 View Post

      Bad traffic refers to irrelevant traffic. Due to higher bounce rate after a while the seo rank will decrease .
      Google has stated at least several dozen times that bounce rate does not affect rankings. That said, Google has been known to lie. More important, is the metrics a page has for a search compared to those same metrics for other websites that rank for a given search query. If bounce rate, per se, is not being used, they could definitely factor in things like how often your listing is clicked (compared to others), how long they stay on your site/page (compared to others) and whether they return to the search results and keep clicking on other results, looking for their answer (and again, how your result's metrics for those things compare to the other sites ranking for that query).

      Since the only way severely high bounce rates (or any other similar metric), comparatively speaking, could happen is if your page(s) didn't match a user's query, I'm not sure it would really matter unless you were actually trying to rank for that query. Your whole site would not be affected because you had bad metrics for queries that were unrelated to your site. No site would rank well if that was the case.
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  • Profile picture of the author parmarjeet
    Bad traffic is a visitors who are not interested in your website's content so they will leave your site within a couple of seconds and your bounce rate increases like hell.

    Mostly new bloggers or affiliate marketer just go ahead and use traffic exchange sites or social media groups. This traffic is called bad traffic which will never convert and you end up with losing your hope to increase Google ranking.
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  • Profile picture of the author lambertson
    I think that the only "bad" traffic is dead traffic (bots). All human traffic is benefiting your site in some way. Don't be obsessed with metrics like bounce rate as they are not always indicating the quality of your page, furthermore, even if Google takes them into attention, I believe their influence is minor.
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  • Profile picture of the author K Edward
    Now that "bad traffic" has been defined, consider this -statistically speaking, bad traffic increases your bounce rate and sends negative signals to search engines.

    Google's aim is to give its users the best user experience, so if your site has a significantly high bounce rate, they're most likely to send traffic to your competitor (all things constant) who has a more "dwell time" because they consider them to be serving their visitors better.
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  • Profile picture of the author paulgl
    Google doesn't know a random website's bounce rate from a hole in the wall.

    Why would they? How could they? They are not as as stoopid as the people who think they are.

    And how the frick do they know where your traffic is coming from?

    Now if you have adsense on it, or use adwords, the pages that have these are monitored....

    But only for monetary purposes on their end. Tons of mindless traffic can send your adsense or adwords into a tizzy.

    Neither of those has anything to do with SEO.

    Bad traffic? Like what?

    You want the epitome of "bad" traffic?

    How about traffic so bad, it's nonexistent...and yet....ranks number one on google?

    Just google something like.... capital of india.

    Wikipedia is #1...and you NEVER have to visit the site!

    Now that's pretty dang baaaaaaad. Or not.

    Paul
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