This may seem like a crazy idea to some, but we're responding to the recent update by making a pivot and downsizing our site rather than try to upgrade what's there. Although the 50% drop we got hit with in the recent update was tough to swallow, we're treating it as an opportunity to get completely away from our old content and platform and essentially relaunch our site with a much smaller, higher quality footprint.
I honestly can't argue with the way Google now views the bulk of our content, based on its stated criteria, and given that we have a low capital investment in what's there, we're just going to accept that the (small) gravy train is over and move forward in a different way. We believe that we can eventually get more from less, even if it might not start out that way.
We also got hit by the caffeine update in May, and we responded at that time with a blog/news site under a subdirectory on our domain with more than 100 freelance writers that on some days has rivaled the traffic on our main site, with far fewer pages. Besides more user engagement, it generates a lot of inbound links and social media traffic, and because it's in Google news helps us compete with much bigger sites.
In contrast, the main site is nearly all feed/machine generated, and while it has some unique content and some user generated content, much of it can be found elsewhere in one form or another. (With this update, Google clearly signaled that aggregation/mashup content strategies may not be as valued as before, especially when the content leans toward the thin side.) So we're just going to move forward in a bigger way with our blog strategy, and abandon the old feed/spider-based system. (By the way, Google's hit on us also means less traffic/authority for our content partners, some of whom got healthy amounts of referral traffic from us and a bunch of inbound links.)
Our working plan, which is not without risk, is below. I'd appreciate any feedback or advice anyone might have.
1. Move ourdomain/blog to ourdomain/, redirecting with 301s as needed. We'll be able to consolidate similar category URLs from one to the other so the navigation schema will be nearly identical.
2. In the first phase, we'll ensure that all category or other important pages from the old site that we want to keep exist in the new CMS, while temporarily allowing a path through to old content pages that have dropped in value.
3. In the second phase, we will first create some new higher quality content in the new CMS that will replace our best-performing pages from the old system. We'll 301 some of those old URLs to the new ones as needed, at least for the ones that have inbound links coming to them.
4. Finally, once all the redirection and new content is in place, we'll want to delete all of the old individual content page URLs (approximately 1 million!), close down the old platform, and reduce our server costs down to a size that fits our new content footprint, which I estimate will be about 30,000 URLs at the beginning. Our writers will continue to create new original content on a daily basis.
5. Our current plan on how to remove those URLs:
--Implement new XML sitemap for new platform, and take down the old one, reporting both actions in webmaster tools.
--Set old pages to noarchive, noindex
--Wait for google response to noindex. Once pages disappear from index, 410 them and move on with new site as sole content footprint.
There's no doubt we could take a big hit on this initially, but we simply don't see any value in trying to preserve what we had before. The main site wasn't growing, and Google kept taking shots at it over time.
What are the risks/challenges/TBDs?
1. Google treats our blog and main site as separate entities. Each of them gets their own set of Sitelinks, for example, and I believe the blog has a higher trust, with a toolbar PR6 versus a PR5 on the root URL. So I'm a bit wary of the signal we're going to send on this change when it comes to ourdomain/ and ourdomain/blog, but what choice do we have?
2. We've got to dump 1 million URLs. How will search engines respond to our URL removal? Do we do it over time? 410 them all immediately? Making big changes is generally considered to be a challenge because of the impact it might have on trust from search engines. But we are determined to move forward in a new way, and have to reduce our server/maintenance costs to match our new model, so not sure how else to do it except to just rip off the band-aid and go for it.
3. Getting Google News transferred correctly is probably my biggest fear. It means someone there actually looking at the site again and I guess there's always a chance they could change their minds about keeping us in.
Without this update, I don't think we would have been brave enough to do it because it was just enough revenue to want to preserve status quo. But now? Seems like the time to try.
Thoughts? Feedback?
