What’s wrong with my site??? I used to think I did everything ‘right’ in terms of organically building a site – good layout, good content, consistent posting, and link building efforts. Initially it seemed to payoff – traffic growth was good and the site reached a respectable 1,500 to 2,000 uniques a day within 6 months. More people were coming to the site – people were commenting, interacting and returning. Then, after six months of strong growth, things stalled. It’s now been a year and a half and things have just gotten worse. Our first PR update gave us a PR of 5….but that really didn’t seem to do much….now, we don’t even show a PR (but Google hasn’t blacklisted the site) and traffic has dropped to 500 uniques a day. Now, keep in mind, the site is a celebrity gossip site, so while 500 uniques / day sounds like a lot for certain sites (I know, I’ve had sites before where I would have killed for 500 uniques / day!) it’s peanuts in the celebrity gossip world. Other similar sites (some that have been up and running way less time have 10,000 or 100,000 uniques a day) I’ve attached the traffic graphs of the site and an Alexa comparison graph which shows how bad our performance is vs. other sites. If you haven't guessed yet, the site is http://hollywoodsnark.com There has to be some search engine optimization things that are going very wrong for our traffic to be so anemic. What can we do better???
A few thoughts: - Canonicalization on inner pages. Make sure every page either has a www or it doesn't. You do this on the front page, but not on the inner ones. - Use nofollow. Why are you passing PageRank on every page to "advertise", "about", "contact us", "login", etc? Nofollow those so the link juice flows through the important links. - What is "Letsconga"? A link on every page, again stealing link juice. Nofollow it or remove it. I'm sure there's more, but that's a start.
Thanks for the advice mickmel! We've changed the nofollow thing - good point - we seem to be leaking PR through those. I don't follow (to use a pun) your comment on the www....I don't see any www on any of our pages? Also, is PR really that important anyway? We started with a '5' PR and things seemed to be ok, but we really weren't even getting that much traffic (as much as you'd expect a PR 5 page to get) and now things have slowed, but our PR has apparently dropped a whole lot and it's not having that much of an effect....
Pr means absolutely nothing in terms of traffic. Where are your main keywords ranking in google? If they arent in the top 10 then your traffic will be down. Its that simple. Why do people mention pr like it actually metters anymore unless ur selling links.
If u need a good seo , i know someone that is very good with boosting sites back up or just getting them back into googles first page.
It still matters. If a website is linking to 10 pages, those 10 pages will be given more link power than if the website was linking to 100 pages. It's not just about PR.