Irrelevant keywords driving traffic to my site

[anuvenkatesh]

Sometime back we built out a few pages targeting few keywords that were not really relevant to our site but just aimed at google adsense and income from it. I know its a bad idea..well not mine though. Then about 3 months back we redirected (301 redirect) all those pages back to our home page. We didn't want those pages anymore. Now, after three months, we are not ranking for those keywords anymore but google analytics shows those keywords in the top 100 keywords that send the most traffic to our site. Bounce rate is high because of that. Its like a backfire. I double checked and we don't rank for those keywords anymore. Its a mystery to me now as to how people are entering our site through those keywords. How is this possible?

[jimbeetle]

Well, it seems that as far as Google is concerned those keywords are still somewhat relevant to your site as you never told Google -- or other SEs for that matter -- that those pages are gone.

The 301 Moved Permanently status code says in part:

The requested resource has been assigned a new permanent URI and any future references to this resource SHOULD use one of the returned URIs.

So basically, you're just telling the SEs to go to a different location to find what they want. Many are going to keep the pages in their index until they get everything sorted out.

Better would be to return a 404, best would be a 410 Gone:

The requested resource is no longer available at the server and no forwarding address is known.

Though most SEs treat 404s and 410s the same, I prefer to future proof myself just in case they start to treat them as they should.

In any case, whether you use a 404 or 410, you should make it a visitor-friendly page. Inform folks that the requested page is no longer available, give them a link to related content, or a link to the home page.

Also, for cases like this it's always best to have a Webmaster Tools account for the site so you can see what Google is reporting as to what pages it has indexed.