I have a site that was smoking hot before all of the Google tapdances happened. I made a pretty solid site with tons of great info and pages thick with info. I did get listed in a few directories and bought some traffic a few times, but nothing else sleazy. My site went from several thousand uniques/day to about 400/day. With each new Google switch, I tank just a little lower. My traffic looks like a slow walk down a flight of stairs... My question is: should I take all of my great content and pull it down and then start a fresh site from scratch? Pros: I'd really like to do it in Wordpress to make it easier. I'm no longer brown-listed I can re-edit and change the content with new information Cons: The old site is DMOZ listed The old site started in 2008 Since it would probably still be on my Adsense account, am I really fooling anybody? Is there someone who can un-murder my site? I'm just super bummed to watch this site that I poured my soul into fade into obscurity. Thanks for any suggestions! Rob
I've noticed on one of my sites that the articles I have written get traffic for a little while and then slowly drop down in the serps. I would suggest refreshing all of your old articles and giving them new life. Do not throw away your articles and start completely over, 400 uniques a day is a good bit of traffic. You can still redo your site with wordpress, just be sure to redirect your old articles to the new article location if your url structure changes.
Sometimes it's best to just start over, and if you do decide to start over, I would recommend WordPress for sure. If you would like you msg me your current site URL, I would be happy to take a look at it and offer my advice after looking at it, and doing a few quick SEO Evaluation tests.
It's hard to know what to advise without knowing why Google has fallen oit of love with your site. Clearly something about your site is unattractive to Google. It's a shame to give up on an aged site with good content and a DMOZ listing but you need to be realistic. Do you have a clear idea of what the problem is? It doesn't sound like there is a problem with your content or onsite factors but your mention of being listed in directories and buying traffic is more cause for concern. Have you looked at exactly when your traffic dropped and if this coincides with a Google update? There is a plugin for Chrome called Chartelligence that overlays the Google update dates on top of your Google analytics. If your traffic drop doesn't match up to any of these dates you can also look at if you got hit with a manual penalty. Look at your backlinks in a good tool like Majestic SEO's site explorer. Are any of the backlinks shady or on unrelated websites? What is your anchor text distribution like? If you your niche is blue widgets and 80% of your links say things like "blue widgets", "cheap blue widgets" and "buy blue widgets" then you're going to have to aggresively get such links removed. If you can't figure it out or it seems like too much of a big job you may want to get a new domain and move over the content. Just make sure you back everything up and that the old content gets deindexed by Google. It's really sad that Google has penalized many worthy sites just because of poor backlinking practices. It doesn't help that they give webmasters very little information on how to fix these problems by identifying exactly what the issues are for individual webmasters.
Hi I know how you feel. It must be so frustrating. I think the whole issue of links having the same keywords is stupid. So my company is called Stardust Kids but if I have too many links that say Stardust Kids those links will be removed. What? Is it just me or is this stupid?