I recently discovered that an old abandoned Blogger site of mine, which I haven't even looked at in over a year, is sitting there with PR4. Even with all of it's broken links and missing images. Can I screw up the page rank by redesigning the site, making it easier to monetize. It was created at least seven or eight years ago, it's not keyword friendly, and it was very active and content heavy. Everything Google loves. Now I'm trying to figure out if I can monetize the site without screwing everything up. Do I need to tread carefully...?
Yes you sure must handle it with care. Need to put a lot of unique content to make it more google friendly.
Google also ranks a site base on its age. Yes, just improve your site to make it nice and add more content in it.
Improving your aged site is easier than a brand new one. However, don't change it all in one day, but do it gradually. This will help you avoid a penalty from Google.
Update content gradually...try promoting it in different places...get rid of those broken links and non-working images You should be fine!
If you havn't even looked at it for a year, what have got to lose? PR4 is a good average, but if the site's abandoned what good is to you? And as PR ismostly made up of backlonks, unlikely you'll do much to bring it down anyway.
My suggesation is do not change any of your old content and keywords if so there is chance to lose your PR. You got the Pr base on that content and keywords if you do any changes Google can easily track it be carefull
Continue update your content and don't change the interface to much. CMIIW, one of my friend said to me, if your PR drop, just wait one to two months and your PR will back again.
Thanks for all of your responses. I'm kind of torn over what I should do with this site. Technically speaking it's an absolute mess. Articles were posted on the blog and all of the images and supporting pages were linked out to other domains I was using. I recently changed hosts on the other domains and never uploaded the files for this blog, which explains all of the missing images and broken links. I've got most of the images back, but some are gone probably forever. I can't think of any reason why I can't share the site with you all. alpineequakes . blogspot . com It's in the earthquake niche. All of the lists, maps and articles are original. I'm not all that excited about resuming this because the software I developed is outdated and it is too time consuming to bring it all back up to date. My other problem is I have a ton of straight html pages (all linked from the right sidebar). On those pages some of the notable earthquakes link out to a message board that I was using for more information. That message forum is gone forever. All of those links in all of those pages are dead and will need to be removed. Another tedious waste of time. I'm just not sure if it's worth all the time to bring this project back to life. I know a lot more about optimizing websites, but even so, I'm not sure if the potential is there to generate enough revenue to pay for my efforts. Most of the visitors are there for info. Just not sure how many preparedness kits I could sell. Here's the traffic report for the last 12 months. Any other thoughts or ideas on this one....?
It is relatively stable, since it is based off backlinks. Don't radically change anything on the site, but add more quality content and quality backlinks. Put adwords on it, and collect $$$