Time related delay for recovering sites

[Whitey]

What's the heads up on time related filtering of recovering sites? Surely we're not the only ones with this problem.

Has anyone taken over a site, or "fixed" an existing site, then had to wait many months ( 6 + ) , maybe a year or more to see the results come back out of the blue, assuming everything is in order.

[ "everything in order" would be that no further factor was introduced after fixing the site, to the date that successful results re appeared ]

I'm trying to get an understanding on why two[2], four[4]year old sites in our 9 site network don't want to reappear in the results. My gut feel says "just wait".

What experiences have good folks had out there in terms of time delay filtering?

[tedster]

In my experience recovery is usually in gradual steps. If you're not seeing ANY movement at all after many months, my take would nbe that just waiting won't be enough - you'll need to take some action.

[Whitey]

Hmmm .... I take your point. If nothing's happening do something.

I read an interesting thread back here on what to do when "sandboxed" which focused on making good use of the situation, which included a post from yourself [ Tedster ].

Life in the Sandbox [webmasterworld.com]

One of our clients has been suffering the sandbox effect for 9 months in very competitive area. They've worked hard on their business model and also on some offline promotion -- and they were actually profitable in these first nine months, essentially on the strength of organic Yahoo and MSN traffic plus a few meta-search engines.
We told them to think of it as though they opened a store on a street with no bus line -- on the hope that the bus line would be located to their street sometime in the future, if only they can stay in business long enough. So instead of picketing the transit authority, they just got down to business with the very real traffic they had.

They recently began an interactive section where the owners answer visitor-submitted questions, and that feature has just taken off -- floods of questions that they can barely keep up with. And the Answers Section helps drive sales in a real and natural way.

I'm proud of them -- and I sure wish I had the magic chip shot that could get them out of the sand trap. When that does happen eventually, they will thrive and they will have earned their success.

Have these sites recovered and , if so , can you relate it to the work you or your clients did?

[edited by: Whitey at 11:43 pm (utc) on May 9, 2007]

[tedster]

The sandbox is long behind that client and they are thriving online. Even though they do have a number of supplemental pages, the online business is working and profitable with many top ten urls that drive purchases.

<added>
I can relate their success to their executing on my input. Instead of imitating the structural chaos that their competition's websites show, they simplified their Information Architecture. The handled their duplicate urls issues. They have a good business and they publicized it. They got links from lots of industry powerhouse sites, they got real press coverage from some major papers and magazines. They continue with the interactive section of their site.

In short, they worked the business and now it is expanding.

[Whitey]

We're working on something similar to embed Q&A's into body content. It'll take a couple of months to get this released and the format right i expect, plus it takes time to build that content over 70k pages.

What i did pick up on the previous thread and this one, is some confident and positive approaches to the situation. Sort of - if you work hard the site will come out in spades [ multiples ].

[ I'm trying to make a call on time investment between sites and how we allocate our effort and resources to each. ]

[edited by: Whitey at 12:21 am (utc) on May 10, 2007]