Site Ranking Question - Restoring Old Site

[dhaliwal82]

Hi Everyone,

I wanted to ask about a website that I have been trying to revive in terms of Google Search traffic but things don't work good enough.

It was a news website that received a lot of traffic (around 30 million users in 2010)
But, then the decline started. Between 2016 and 2019, the site wasn't updated much.

In 2019, I started working on the website again and started posting around 5 stories per day.

For almost 18 months, have been regularly updating website.

However, there hasn't been any revival in terms of rankings or traffic.

The website still makes money but search traffic is minimal.

Nothing is done in terms of SEO, other than having moderate quality content.

<snip>

Thanks.

[edited by: goodroi at 12:01 pm (utc) on Mar 6, 2021]
[edit reason] Welcome to WebmasterWorld, now please go read the forum rules :) [/edit]

[Pjman]

I'm assuming there is a substantial legacy link profile?

[techieguy]

Hey Dhaliwal,

Several factors affect to decrease in the traffic of your website.

To identify from where you are lack behind, you need to start analyzing your website.

You need to check your website is not being affected by any Google Algorithm.

Check your website in the Google search console for identifying the technical issues and Google analytics to get an idea when traffic started decreasing.

The most important thing here is to check your backlink profile. Make sure you get authenticate and healthy backlinks from the related websites.

As you mentioned, you didn't work on SEO, so you need to focus on on-page SEO deeply to identify the loopholes.

Also, you can work on the off-page SEO to increase the awareness and brand value of your site.

I hope this will help you.

[lammert]

No matter how much SEO you'll do, with five stories per day, you won't attract a 30 million user base again. You have to ramp up output creation, for 30 million users probably creating an office full of professional editors.

It is important to understand why the decline started. Was it the content, the rise of a better competitor, or maybe some bad decisions on SEO which backfired (linking strategy etc). Dependent on that, decide on your steps forward.

[tangor]

Starting around 2014-16 the web giants like g and fb began vetting news sites for authority, content, "misinformation" and more. These aspects likely play into your lost/dwindling traffic as well as a period of long neglect. News has always been a difficult niche, but these days is more so with the additional fact checking, vetting, etc.

Good luck!

[Gautam]

There may be many reasons from server issues to traffic sources and even broken tracking.

Google updates are most quoted reason for drops in organic traffic.

Sometimes, the reason for drop in site traffic is a case of unreliable data, double check your site's tracking code.

Your site is losing links can also be a reason.