Ahrefs Study: 91% of Web Pages Are Not Getting Search Traffic
Posted: Mon Dec 09, 2024 7:08 am
Every day, Ahrefs Content Explorer finds about 1.8 million new pages on the web. But more than 90% of the content on the web is invisible to search engines. Most pages are never seen or read, according to Ahrefs research.
Ahrefs conducted a similar study last year . It looked at about 2 million randomly selected pages. Only 5.7% of them made it into Google's top 10 within a year of publication. 94.3% of the content received no traffic from search engines.
Studying 2 million pages on the Internet scale and the subsequent conclusions is not an indicative example. Therefore, this year, all data from the Ahrefs Content Explorer tool was used - this is almost taiyuan mobile phone numbers database a billion pages. The results of the previous study were confirmed:
90.88% of pages received no search traffic;
4.5% received no more than 10 users from search engines per month;
3.09% – up to 100 visits;
1.24% – up to 1000;
0.3% – more than 1000 users.
Here is a list of the top 500 pages, sorted by search traffic - for SEO purposes. The list excludes portals that belong to the DR91+ category of sites (DR is the domain rating according to Ahrefs classification; DR91+ are trusted sites). Also excluded are all articles that were published less than 100 days ago - to filter out pages that experienced traffic spikes due to being included in Google's "Top News".
There are two common reasons why pages fail to get search traffic.
Reason one: no one links to the page
Backlinks are one of the main factors in ranking pages in search engines.
Ahrefs' research results show the following:
55.24% of pages have no incoming links;
29.79% – have backlinks from 1-3 sites;
11.51% – no more than 10 pages;
3.35% – up to 100 incoming links;
0.11% – more than 100.
It can be concluded that most pages do not have incoming links and do not receive search traffic.
The following graph shows the relationship between the number of backlinks and search traffic:
Here you can see a linear relationship: the more backlinks a page has, the more search traffic it receives.
A similar relationship can be traced between the number of incoming links and the number of queries that result in a page being included in Google's search results:
Thus, high-quality backlinks to a site are necessary to get into search engine results and receive organic traffic from them.
Attracting search traffic without backlinks is possible if the system does not find stronger competitive domains in the search for this query. Another option is to use complex low-frequency keywords.
The second reason: no one searches for such pages
If there is no traffic from search engines despite the presence of incoming links, then the page is optimized for non-competitive keywords.
The histogram shows that more than 30 thousand sites do not receive organic traffic, but have more than 200 backlinks:
There may be several reasons:
The content is no longer interesting to the user. This happens with news – it often gets a lot of backlinks. There are minimal real transitions from search engines to news pages, since users do not search for something they do not know about or are not interested in past events.
The page is dedicated to a general topic. It is more difficult for users to formulate a request under too general content.
The page contains theoretical data. This could be statistics, research, analytics – anything that regular users are not looking for. Narrowly focused content is relevant to a small portion of the audience.
Ahrefs conducted a similar study last year . It looked at about 2 million randomly selected pages. Only 5.7% of them made it into Google's top 10 within a year of publication. 94.3% of the content received no traffic from search engines.
Studying 2 million pages on the Internet scale and the subsequent conclusions is not an indicative example. Therefore, this year, all data from the Ahrefs Content Explorer tool was used - this is almost taiyuan mobile phone numbers database a billion pages. The results of the previous study were confirmed:
90.88% of pages received no search traffic;
4.5% received no more than 10 users from search engines per month;
3.09% – up to 100 visits;
1.24% – up to 1000;
0.3% – more than 1000 users.
Here is a list of the top 500 pages, sorted by search traffic - for SEO purposes. The list excludes portals that belong to the DR91+ category of sites (DR is the domain rating according to Ahrefs classification; DR91+ are trusted sites). Also excluded are all articles that were published less than 100 days ago - to filter out pages that experienced traffic spikes due to being included in Google's "Top News".
There are two common reasons why pages fail to get search traffic.
Reason one: no one links to the page
Backlinks are one of the main factors in ranking pages in search engines.
Ahrefs' research results show the following:
55.24% of pages have no incoming links;
29.79% – have backlinks from 1-3 sites;
11.51% – no more than 10 pages;
3.35% – up to 100 incoming links;
0.11% – more than 100.
It can be concluded that most pages do not have incoming links and do not receive search traffic.
The following graph shows the relationship between the number of backlinks and search traffic:
Here you can see a linear relationship: the more backlinks a page has, the more search traffic it receives.
A similar relationship can be traced between the number of incoming links and the number of queries that result in a page being included in Google's search results:
Thus, high-quality backlinks to a site are necessary to get into search engine results and receive organic traffic from them.
Attracting search traffic without backlinks is possible if the system does not find stronger competitive domains in the search for this query. Another option is to use complex low-frequency keywords.
The second reason: no one searches for such pages
If there is no traffic from search engines despite the presence of incoming links, then the page is optimized for non-competitive keywords.
The histogram shows that more than 30 thousand sites do not receive organic traffic, but have more than 200 backlinks:
There may be several reasons:
The content is no longer interesting to the user. This happens with news – it often gets a lot of backlinks. There are minimal real transitions from search engines to news pages, since users do not search for something they do not know about or are not interested in past events.
The page is dedicated to a general topic. It is more difficult for users to formulate a request under too general content.
The page contains theoretical data. This could be statistics, research, analytics – anything that regular users are not looking for. Narrowly focused content is relevant to a small portion of the audience.