How to bring back Google love to an abandoned site

[alika]

Got a site that was abandoned about ten years ago. Used to get 5K-10K organic traffic with domain authority in the 40s range. Now authority score is 5, and organic traffic less than 100 per month. No manual penalties. Just no new activity and no content in the past decade.

I've started redesigning the site and cleaning up the content - specifically, setting up the pages based on the new Wordpress theme, improving images, removing the Adsense ads, adding internal links, etc. The content is mostly interviews (average length from 1500-2000 words) and tips (average length 600-1000 words), so it doesn't have the issue of thin content. I've submitted the sitemap and now seeing a small uptick in the Google search console but it still has a lot of pages not indexed in Google. I figure to clean up existing pages first and resubmit in search console, then start creating new content.

If you have a dead site that lost the love of Google, how will you make it back into Google's love?

Thanks

[ErrlyBird]

Good content and backlinks. Same as any site you just have a leg up on those things. Shouldn't take you as long as a fresh site, even with 5 AS is better than starting fresh. Just do all the things and you should see some results.

[not2easy]

I would put some attention to ensuring the theme and layout are mobile friendly and up to speed, because those are some of the major changes over the past 10 years.

Today's success wants fast loading and more video content than articles unfortunately. If possible, see if accessibility tools can be activated to "read it to me" for articles and interviews. Readers will read, but an awful lot of people want to hear or see it rather than scroll down a page.

[nomis5]

I am in the process of hopefully reviving a site ignored for eight years or so.
First step, convert it to https.
Next, implement a privacy policy which Google approves of.
I am now just starting to make the website mobile friendly.
This update process has being going on for six months with what appears to be good results.
If site speed was a major problem I would pay major attention to that, but in my case this is a minor problem.
I will create some video content but previous experience in my sector indicates that this is not a key factor.
Backlinks - I ignore completely. Previous experience has shown to me that they are irrelevant now- they were but not now.

Pictures, pictures and more pictures. This has it's own benefits but also an additional benefit I believe which is not obvious at first. As I take those pictures and incorporate them into my articles it has the effect of forcing me to re-evaluate the written content. That cause me to improve and update the written content.

If at all possible, incoroporate some degree or user personalisation into how the site is presented to each user. This is how, in previous websites, I have achieved top ranking results and also top earnings. It is the key reason why I am still in this business 25 years after joining it. An old website injected with a good degree of user personailisation is one way of maing the difference between a decling site and an improving site.

[superclown2]

If at all possible, incorporate some degree or user personalisation into how the site is presented to each user.

Care to elaborate on how you did that? I tried location based personalisation some time ago on a site that Google promptly slammed.

[tangor]

One site, managed, but not regularly updated for 10 years...

Moved to https
Revised to fully responsive
Got rid of all the third party stuff (fonts, js, etc. except for required functions)
Navigation compacted and made consistent with server side inclusions
Cleared hodge podge main.css to semantic-protected and added *styles*
Updated existing content where needed
Added NEW content (about 10% increase over existing)
Consolidated broadly similar content into more effective articles
Made all art/photos more suitable for "larger screen resolutions" while optimized

Saw a 50% increase in organic over the next two months and has been holding level or rising slightly ever since.

NOTE: all the restructure and coding was done and tested on a dev system until all kinks were worked out. Then at 2am (my time) The old site was backed up, the root cleared, and the dev copy loaded ... took about 90 minutes total.

Never worried about backlinks in near 27 years...

YMMV

[nomis5]

Superclown2, I will PM you with two of my previous websites where I successfully personalised the website presented to users. I have sold both so no problem for me.

The level of personalisation did not alter much in the presentation of each page but that personalisation was very relevant to the viewers.

Without giving anything away here, let me give a totally unconnected example. I have no experience of the example I give below at all but it may illustrate.

If you are a travel website concerned with skiing it may not be all that helpful to say to you readers that in central Europe the ski slopes are useable between November to March depending on where in central Europe you are planning to visit.

As a user I may be going to southern France and their conditions there for skiing may be quite different from those in southern Italy.

So what I did for my particular subject was ask the user to enter the area they were interested in and based on that I would present different dates to them. No major changes to how the page appeared except for the dates presented to them.

You will be surprised how many readers are willing to enter that type of information. And hey presto with the magic of cookies I could always present to them information that was relevant to them. Tiny but hugely important information to them.

It kept both of my websites head and shoulders above almost all the others. Of course some hugely established and respected websites will always outrank you but even so, I was always above the rest of the websites. It kept me in relative luxury for two decades and I intend to do the same with my latest website in the next two years.