Advice on fixing a site broken since April 2012

[JS_Harris]

You might recognize the date as being when Google Penguin rolled out for the first time, it flattened a site I'd like to revive. Since then I have..

- Disavowed any questionable links, I had not spammed it to begin with
- Removed low value pages by either improving them, merging them or deleting them.(5% of pages affected)
- Removed 1 adsense unit, the site had 2 but now only has 1 and it's in the sidebar
- Strengthened the code. It loads exceedingly quickly, is responsive and gets a 96% in yslow
- Checked and re-checked for duplicate content. Filed 20 or so DMCA notices, it had little duplicate content
- Checked internal link structure. Articles interlink where it makes sense, no widgets do this.
- Reduced the number of categories from 8 to 6, enhanced the category page with category specific content
- Check the link profile, the site has a decent but not spectacular link profile. Many links from similar sites, forums etc incl a couple of edu links from in depth reports on the subject, cited as a source.
- Titles are descriptive, on topic, accurate and get a good CTR from google serps
- Metrics look OK, currently at 2.8 pageviews per visitor with a 42-44% bounce rate
- Looks good on mobile, smartphone traffic now exceeds desktop traffic
- The site has more evergreen content than opinions or stuff that requires a following.
- Most pages rank top 10 but low top 10, none seem to get top 5 however

I know about other things to check and across the board I would say the site *should* perform much better than it does. It was written off by Penguin, lost 90% traffic and has never returned. The site doesn't cost me anything to run but any effort spent creating new content for it feels futile since it all gets ignored as well. Time to pull the plug?

[aakk9999]

It is very difficult to advise someone whether to pull the plug or not. If you are close to pull the plug then maybe I would give it one more different shot and this is to perhaps create a new site and move just one section of your non-performing site there and then add some new content there to see if this gets the attention? Or selectively choose the best content and move it to the new site? Perhaps try initially without redirection from the parts of the old site?

On the other hand, if the site is not sinking further, and there is no effort/cost other than the new content, perhaps you can just stop updating it and leave it for a while to see what happens?

[aristotle]

When you disavow backlinks, you lose any incoming link juice they may have provided before you disavowed them. So if those backlinks were previously helping to boost your rankings, they no longer are.

[sangi]

It's a no brainer - keep the website running. Does the AdSense cover running costs? If no, then remove it completely until better days come. I would consider buying a new domain and moving all content and redirecting (301) all urls to it. There's saying 'Google never forgets', so this well may be the case and the only way to break from the Gs curse.

[JS_Harris]

Disavowing the backlinks happened a couple of years after the rankings slid and nothing changed, good or bad, from doing that.

Ads do cover the running cost and, aside from requiring the occasional update, the content is primarily evergreen and timeless. After writing that post I dug into the site and tried something new, as follows.

I noticed that, occasionally, a category page will outrank an actual page via the snippet on the category page. That usually clears itself up when the page becomes trusted, linked to etc. This being an old site I wondered why it still happens from time to time. Instead of thinking about it as if the page has a problem I decided to just accept it as a signal that Google prefers category-like pages and I did this:

- Gathered a few articles that were similar in subject but not content. example: custom widgets, they are all widgets but people have done cool things to differentiate them.
- Moved the content from each page onto a new page about "custom widgets" in which several former individual pages now all share the same page.
- Links at the top of the page allow people to jump to the specific custom widget section they might be looking for
- 301 the original pages to the new mega page

My hopes is that the new mega pages will rank for a less specific set of keywords, thus drawing in a wider range of possible visitors. Instead of custom widget by acme and custom widget by someguy it's now simply custom widgets. I'm also hoping that by having links pointing to different sections of the same page that Google will add a few links at the bottom of my serps entries.

I condensed 22 pages into 5 new pages with 301's on all. If this doesn't "shake things loose" I'm not sure anything will at this point. Several sources suggest the keywords are well searched for and I believe it because I used to get a lot of traffic for them. Google hasn't stuffed the rankings with their own stuff, yet, but the rankings slid after Panda(I said Penguin above, but it's Panda, my apologies).

[aakk9999]

My hopes is that the new mega pages will rank for a less specific set of keywords, thus drawing in a wider range of possible visitors.

Good idea. Please do report back on your experiment - it would be interesting to know the results!

[tangor]

My hopes is that the new mega pages will rank for a less specific set of keywords, thus drawing in a wider range of possible visitors

Did something similar to a long term evergreen site a year or so back and can report traffic did increase significantly. A smaller target seems to do better these days than long tail.

[JS_Harris]

I've found a total of 30 candidate pages(site had 310 pages, it now has 287), all of which 301 to one of the 7 new pages. Now I need to wait for it all to propagate and Panda to run etc.

- I'm wondering if 301 to the new pages was the right way to go(vs 404 or, more likely, 410)

The worry is that Google, for a time, simply thinks the new pages are duplicate since they contain a lot of what was on the original pages. I doubt it will be a problem but it might require a couple of updates to get it right. I'll report back in a few weeks about these pages, hopefully with good news. I've done everything else I can think of to set the bar as high as possible quality wise.

[JS_Harris]

Some early results, the new pages seem to be ranking much as any new page would. According to GWT some keywords have shifted from the old pages to the new as well. I don't expect the site to "settle" for a month or more so I'm leaving it alone for a couple of months before seeing where it stands in terms of rankings and traffic. So far the early data is encouraging.