No way to raise up visits - Sandbox or what?

[specter]

Hello everyone :),

I'm managing a poetry blog. I created it 1 year ago.
Initially, I published only a hundred of poems pages, getting around 100 visits per day. In the time, with no new pages added, visit rate decreased spontaneously till arriving to only a dozen of visits per day.

So I reviewed the blog: I esthablished poems categories, and created correspondent "preview page" for each one of them: that "preview page" simply shows snippets of the best 5 poems about the selected category containing keywords in text. This is intended as a "trick" to get more content pages comparison to poems pages that for their own nature are poor of text.
In that way I got around 250 "optimized" pages to serve to Google index, from wich I supposed to get around 500 visits per day.
Now pages are indexed as I can see from sitemap response in Google webmaster tools, but visits don't raise up in any way.
Also, I got more and more backlinks...
What's wrong with my blog?


Thank you very much for participation.

[specter]

anyone?

[indyank]

In that way I got around 250 "optimized" pages to serve to Google index, from which I supposed to get around 500 visits per day.

Are there any keyword or key phrases that you are trying to rank these pages? Have you analyzed the traffic potential for the keywords or key phrases and where exactly do you rank for them?

How did you arrive at the target of 500 visits per day?

[specter]

hello,

I did not really analyze potential page performance; is a poetry blog, I think I don't need such an accurate evaluation.
I simply assumed to get averagely 2 visits per page, considering that some pages with better ranking could bring around 10 visits per day, while some other only 1,2 or 0 visits per day...
The fact is that the pages don't come up in serps in any way. They are indexed but not effectively ranked...
Maybe 500 visits per day are not a realistic goal, but at least a hundred would be feasable I suppose...but I don't go over 10 visits per day...

The page structure is something like that:

In this page you will find poems about "widgets":

Poem 1:
...Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, widget consectetur adipiscing elit. Nulla eget justo ante. Morbi malesuada iaculis lacinia...

Poem 2:
...Mauris ante lacus, accumsan non volutpat vitae, porta at massa. Aenean tortor risus, ultricies quis commodo nec, mollis et velit. widget volutpat scelerisque nisi, ac commodo massa dapibus sed...

Poem: Widget
...Fusce ac eros tellus. Vivamus ut ante orci, eget sagittis nisi. Nullam in quam at risus sodales luctus. In sapien magna, tincidunt eget placerat at, sollicitudin vitae nisl. Fusce id nunc enim...

Poem 4
...Morbi adipiscing sapien at est tristique in tempus nunc elementum. Integer vitae eleifend dui. widget ...

Each poem title links the correspondant poem page, and each snippet is a "preview" of the poem text containing the keyword I would rank for.

Did I get penalty?
Did I wrong something?
I really don't know what to think...

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

50, 500 or 500,000 pages about "poems" can still only return 1 top 10 result in Google for "poems" and if poems is searched for 50 times a day your ceiling is 50 visitors.

You have some keyword research to do.

[mhansen]

Just a stab.... but have you taken into consideration that you built the site as a blog, and unless it gets regular updates with fresh content (as a "blog" would) it gets a bit of discounted authority?

Blog: (From wikipedia [en.wikipedia.org]) Usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

I know I am splitting hairs here, and I too use a blog platform as a content system for almost ALL sites I produce, but Gorgle may use the fact that the CMS is a blog, as one of those 250 ranking factors, and since your newest content is more than a year old... treat it like old content. (would that be de-caffinated?)

I don't know if its a factor or not... just something else to consider.

[specter]

50, 500 or 500,000 pages about "poems" can still only return 1 top 10 result in Google for "poems" and if poems is searched for 50 times a day your ceiling is 50 visitors.

You have some keyword research to do.

Pages are not about "poems" but about poems categories.
So there is a page of "poems about gold", a page of "poems about children", a page of "poems about war" and so on, 250 different optimized category pages, according with the structure I posted above where "widget" is the specific keyword/category.

As regard to the consideration proposed by Mhansen, I would say that I often find older blog pages in top search results. Should be worth the text relevance and pertinence, not the "freshness" of the content.

Moreover, the new category pages I created have been added only a month ago, so they anyway should appear as fresh content...

[leafgreen]

Simply research the traffic for other poem blogs, and see what the most popular ones are doing differently. Also look at the traffic of similarly formatted poem blogs. My guess is that their traffic will be similar. Also, echoing @Sgt_Kickaxe, my guess is that poems are simply not very popular subjects. Don't take that personally.

[specter]

I'm aware that poetry is not a popular subject, but this doesn't explain these results.
I started from 100 visits per day, with non-optimized pages...
Now, I fallen to 10 visits per day with hundreds of optimized pages?...

The problem is not that people don't like poetry, but that my optimized pages don't come up in serps...they are not properly ranked.
I get no visits because pages are not in top ten results; no one can find them...
This is the REAL problem, and I don't know why...

[tedster]

When you made the changes, did you disrupt the original click paths that lead to your original poem pages?

[specter]

When you made the changes, did you disrupt the original click paths that lead to your original poem pages?

Yes, I did. I remade almost all the urls and page titles of the site.
But new sitemap has already been detected, pages are indexed but not ranked.
I'm not concerned about poems pages but about new "landing pages" I've created expressely for G.

[tedster]

You previously circulated your PageRank in a specific way. Since you only had poems pages, those were the pages that ranked and got traffic. Now you have a major disruption to that established pattern -something like starting a website from scratch, except you are still using an established domain name.

It can take a long time for Google to sort all that - there are many technical challenges involved and you most likely have "cut the power" to a lot of your content.

It's going to be a wait for you, most of all. Redirects from your old URLs to the new ones can help. Getting other sites who deep link to change the URLs they use can help. And new deep links from others will also help.

Beyond that, there are so many technical possibilities for repair that I barely know where to start. I suggest you begin with some of the threads in the Guidelines section of our Hot Topics area [webmasterworld.com], which is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page.

[specter]

Thanks for your indications Tedster.
At this point I'll wait. I'm not in a hurry. Just I was concerned about some kind of penalty/sandbox or similar...
Anyway I'll take a look to the hot topics area if there is something I can do to help the process, and in case I'll refer to you for further clarifications.

Thanks again.

Regards