Determining which of the mini sites in your network to keep or kill

[goodroi]

Some of us have amassed a network of sites and many of these sites are mini sites that might have started for niche projects or for an old link building scheme or some other reason that sounded smart way back in time. So now you might be wondering how do I figure out which sites are worth maintaining and which mini sites are just pointless. Well that was the debate I was having this past weekend.

Our consensus was if you are averaging close to only one Googlebot visit per day your domain is either penalized or not generating enough link equity to be worth keeping.

You really want to be two or more Googlebot visits daily.

How do you evaluate smaller sites?

[JesterMagic]

I've never done a mini site myself (or amassed a network of sites) but I tend to kill a site:

- If I haven't been doing at least minimal maintenance (security concerns)
- Contains a lot of outdated information
- I don't see that the content will be relevant in the future

[aristotle]

Well you shouldn't create a site in the first place unless you intend to make it into something worth keeping for the long term.

[tangor]

Depends on the site, right? I won't build my presentations around any bot visits. I build for humans.

[goodroi]

Yes, you can build for humans but if googlebot doesn't like your site you are probably not going to have many humans see your hardwork so IMHO it is usually wise to care if googlebot visits.

Having googlebot request /ads.txt is IMHO another sign of a healthy site that is theoretically capable of ranking in Google aka not a dead site that should be put out of its misery.

[johnm56]

I've recently killed two sites, one was for a business that I was going to get going but never actually got around to putting any work into. The other was for a town that I used to live in, I spent a year trying to get someone interested in taking it over without any success. In both cases they had really outlived their usefulness.

I've never actually thought of looking at the number of googlebot visits and it strikes me as a good idea. It's certainly something that I'll keep in mind for next time (not that I have masses of sites nowadays).

[engine]

Traffic: If the site doesn't have any traffic it's not worth my time. Some sites get their traffic from niche links, which is sometimes more traffic than come in from a search because the niche link has a better ranking. Having said that, of course, if gbot and bingbot don't visit, there won't be much traffic.