Google Says Traffic Is Not A Measure Of Search Quality

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that traffic is not necessarily a quality measure. Basically, John is saying just because a certain number of pages do not get as much traffic as another set of pages, it does not mean those pages are higher or lower in quality in the eyes of Google Search.

John was asked, “suppose that my website has 500 articles. 400 of them are shown in good positions in Google. The others 100 almost don’t get any visit. Are these 100 considered unuseful content?”

John replied, “Traffic is not a measure of utility or quality. Maybe it’s that few people have that question? You should know your users and the topic best, and be able to make that call, don’t delegate the decision to a metric that’s easy to measure.”

John actually said something like this back in 2015, where he said traffic from search is not a quality indicator. He said, “Using just the traffic from search as an indicator for the quality of your web site might work sometimes but I wouldn’t say this is the main way you should be looking at the quality of your content.”

Sometimes, you can write something super amazing, but it is so niche, it doesn’t get that much traffic.

Here are these new set of tweets:

Traffic is not a measure of utility or quality. Maybe it’s that few people have that question? You should know your users and the topic best, and be able to make that call, don’t delegate the decision to a metric that’s easy to measure.

— John Mueller is mostly not here 🐀 (@JohnMu) January 7, 2023

Forum discussion at Twitter.