My 2 sites took a hit in Google

Affiliate Marketing sites down

[JayDev]

I have 2 sites that generate income from AM. I have recently worked on the sites and changed hosting company. I believe Google indexed one of the sites while changing server and a very basic index page was up at the time. "Under construction"...

My traffic went from 100 to 2 or 3 /day since then.

In addition, the other site has lost some traffic I believe because of lack of content.

My question is:

Am I better off starting out a new domain/site? or increasing relevant content and increase links on the existing domain?

[rfung]

I think the best bet would be to put the content back up and wait till google indexes your page(s) again, assuming you already have some backlinks to this site, you don't want to lose that.

On a related topic - for anyone reading this, is there any way to prevent or tell google or the se's that the page is experiencing some problems and not to index when that happens? for instance last week my sites were down because of some database issues, so I have a default pretty error page ("I'm sorry , we're currently experiencing some problems, blah blah") and I was afraid that google would decide to show up just then and index all my pages with that same message.

[teenwolf]

Working with (and improving) an existing domain is almost always better than starting with a new one.

[dcristo]

Be more patient :)

When transferring websites from one hosting company to another, it's always a good idea to leave the website contents on the old server until the changeover has taken place. This will make the transfer as seemless as possible.

Just transfer all your files onto your new web server and you should see your previous rankings come back.

[howiejs]

"Working with (and improving) an existing domain is almost always better than starting with a new one."

I don't agree 100% with the above

improve what you have - but you should always be launching building new sites to diversify

[JayDev]

Wow, thank you for all your comments!

I'll just be patient and wait for Google to crawl the site again. It seems that Google crawls once a month. Is it a good sign, bad sign or no sign at all (irrelevant)?

For a site that has 50 to 100 daily visitors for the last year without much work, if any, on linking, unique content, and general SEO: How realistic is it to plan on increasing traffic to 1500-2000 visitors a day within 6 months to one year? Obviously considering a large effort on developing links and unique content.

Again thank you for your feedback!

[chrisnrae]

>>> How realistic is it to plan on increasing traffic to 1500-2000 visitors a day within 6 months to one year

If your industry has that type of traffic to give and you do what you say in regards to working hard on unique content and links? Very.