Relaunching old website with Adsense on it

The experiment: pros, cons, challenges, opinions welcome

[explorador]

The brief, sure without the specifics: Old ugly-duck website (around 1998 with 3K pages, not heavy content), never meant for Adsense or alike, mostly pictures on it. Generated good revenue on it's own and then when the ads were added was very consistent on daily revenue. Ugly-duck? that kind of site not attractive, simple but somehow keeps the traffic and revenue, whenever you try to make it pretty... doesn't work. It's not "me", I tried several approaches that work on other cases, also based on Webmaster World wisdom and then I learned it was better to revert and leave it as it is, actually ended up regretting the attempts of making it better. (It's been a while we bring discussions like this one here, it became mostly about Adsense tech stuff and numbers).

The problem: the website started loosing revenue and then traffic, now I'm up for a relaunch, this time there is nothing to loose or regret, I will be working mostly on the initial goal (own services, not exactly Adsense). What I have:

- Tons of unique pictures of widgets..., my own photographic work
- Blue widgets, red widgets, arctic widgets, city widgets, etc
- Well indexed
- Decent amount of incoming links
- Little content (words, text), my other websites have lots of original content
- Non responsive design
- Very poor traffic, around 50 visits x day (used to perform decently on 300-500 x day)
- Now very poor Adsense performance (pennies x month, really)

My thoughts: I could think low traffic = low earnings but I don't want to increase it adding incoming links, or posts, or content of the same nature just making the site bigger, not even keeping the original design, it's time for a change. I know for experience lot's of old pages (there and removed) have a lot of value on SES, in fact some of us know you can have good content on page ABC.htm, kill it and it's better to add it again on the same url/filename. SES have a memory (not interested on discussing this right now).

My plan:

- New design (fast, not heavy, fully responsive, cms of my own)
- Add lots of new content, text, original stuff
- Release the content weekly, not all at once
- New and old pictures of widgets, new size
- Just one ad on a sidebar

Regroup: The ugly stuff... I have far too many pictures and stuff of widgets. I plan to redirect all the blue widget pages to one page of "blue-widgets" and all the red widgets to just one "red-widget-page", etc. Example: from 500 pages I will end up with 5, one per color. Was unsure on (1) keeping the old pages and remove the ads, having a two diff looks on the website with visible links (new, old) OR (2) removing them all the old stuff and bring the grouping-pages-content mentioned above. I decided to go for #2. Why? to make it easier, to keep things on better order, to avoid repetitive stuff, make the site more content rich and honestly I don't think those pages are going to provide much traffic anymore.

Expectations: I don't think the traffic will stay this low, the earnings will not change significantly but will improve in 3 months (my guess), at least no more pennies per month. Why bother? tried researching with no luck, some sites produced good income with no clue on how (really), it produced actually quite good money back in the day.

So let's see! opinions welcome.

[netmeg]

What kind of ads do you expect to get for this site? Is it likely to attract shoppers of any type? Do you know (yet) who your target audience is likely to be? I do kind of wonder how much AdSense a mostly picture oriented site that isn't targeting people in a buying cycle can bring in - are there affiliate possibilities?

For my own purposes, and I stick mostly with various types of event sites, I know I'm an outlier, but I generally assume two years for me to "grow" a new site into becoming a reasonable earner. I might start it off with an ad unit, or I might just wait six months, but I don't really go full AdSense until it's been around a while. What I'm saying is - manage your expectations. Though it sounds like you already are.

[explorador]

From start got interested on attracting direct shoppers, good income then dropping (long story, times change), I know what my audience is (or was mostly). Attracted a wide range of ads and identified the ones working good, also got targeted (locations, ads). My primary focus now is my own services. Picture oriented websites don't perform too well now, they used to, I don't remember if martinibuster or incredibill had one of those (galleries). Can't talk much on the kind of people they bring (too specific I guess) but I can say stock photo is one of them (very generally).

Yes quite clear on my expectations. 300-500 daily unique is not much (was back in the day) and honestly it was VERY difficult to beat this site earnings with other websites filled with content and way more visits, interesting, never got far trying to understand how that worked, my revenue no longer relies on this website but I bet this relaunch will bring more than few pennies per month.

[explorador]

Follow up: old content was removed on friday, same day new content was uploaded, 35 aprox new original articles, text, pictures. 301 redirects were placed for important links and sections, 404 for what's gone. Took 3 days for G to reindex the main page content and get some of the new pages. Adsense has been removed and will stay that way for a while. A brother site with good traffic will kick in some support later, for now I'm just watching how things go on this site alone.

[netmeg]

Keep us posted; I'm interested in how this goes.

[explorador]

New content seems fully indexed (as posted previously didn't take long), some old stuff that was removed keeps appearing on results despite the 404. Traffic was terrible on 2 digits daily unique when the relaunch was initiated, went down to half, still 2 digits (quite terrible really). New stuff is on one of those mysterious sandboxes because it's indexed but doesn't appear on first page yet, let's see, will keep updating.

No adsense yet, will take a while and it depends on the site response.

[explorador]

While I expect little because it really takes time to build traffic and income, I'm curious on the impact of removing Adsense from this site related to the network of websites I have. It's been discussed it's advisable to remove ads from poor performing pages. I did on a website basis and so far there is no positive or negative impact on earnings. It's been a week or so.

Adsense variations on earnings make it kinda difficult to measure, not like in the past, it was really steady on my case, day to day, so let's see what happens. G Insights reported almost no problems with the old site while WMT reported several issues regarding the site being displayed on mobile devices, all the errors are gone with the new layout and design, responsive, etc.

[explorador]

Crossover between Adsense matters and Traffic/Search/engines?

New content is solid, spiders came and picked everything but traffic is still down, no change. Past times/experiences with this website chance (around year 2000) showed Google picking everything around 2 weeks later, it's about time but the effects still don't appear. Direct domain check on G show very few links, as if the site has been penalized, who knows, some sort of sandbox? that's all about traffic: no change after dropping to half when the old stuff was removed and new site was placed.

As for Adsense, difficult to tell. All the ads were removed, BUT... my network is showing less daily earnings, interesting. Gut feeling this is related. This website has only pennies per month impact on the overall earnings of my network, I was hopping a positive impact on removing this site and ads from the network but the opposite happened, earnings went a bit down. It's difficult to tell because Adsense is not the same, not as fully stable as before but still I'm seeing an effect on removing this ugly duck from the network. Targeted perhaps or just plain random effect, I think the first has more chances of being the cause. Will keep waiting and see what happens.

[eek2121]

FYI, for my site, google tends to sandbox about half my new content for a week or two, then it figures out where it wants the content to go rank wise and it appears on the first page (usually in the top 5 results). It will likely take some time for things to work out. A good way to track is to grab some keywords from your site and plug it into a free account you can create at serpfox.com. This tool tracks keywords on google and their positions over time. You'll likely see the keywords bounce a while, then start to rank.

[explorador]

Thanks eek2121. I never faced such sandbox effect, ever, I'm familiar with the concept and your description fits the scenario, I'm still waiting for the effects. I'm still seeing 404's not being handled as expected by Bing and Google (mostly Bing).

This website use to cover most of the first page of G results back in the day but that's gone, I think it gets trickier with new content: surely a sandbox. I'm curios on the earnings effect while I just removed the whole site from the network using adsense, also curios on how clients-advertisers see things from the other side relating gone ads-options. Will keep checking and posting.

[explorador]

Whatever happened to the site on Google eyes (punishment!) is still there. The new content has been indexed, yes, but doesn't appear easily. URL domain checking on google shows only 2 results on frontpage while a recently launched (new) site was indexed in one week showing all the pages using the same url domain check. Searching on G works only using specific terms, so it's not like searching "pictures of widgets", it's about searching almost for the direct url.

Will wait. Nothing wrong on the site, no rules broken, just an abandoned site, it seems G declared it as "dead".

[tangor]

Older domains that once did well, now long in tooth, but with ads, has some value rank wise. I've done "new" from old for a number of clients and tried several strategies, one of which mirrors your description.

That did not go well.

The others, some piecemeal new content, keeping the old until made new, but keeping the ads in place generally did better. I suppose G saw the sites in remake, thus keeping that older rank trust.

Those where the ads were dropped un5til traffic appeared.... well some are still waiting for that traffic. :) (or) :(

Graphic sites, without a clear sales aspect, used to rule, but barely make the grade these days. Also bear in mind that an older graphics site has been so scrapped and mined that any original ranking for images has been vastly diluted.

Where the consideration comes in is does the ad income at least cover operating costs? If so, keep the site up as there is no harm/loss. Anyth8ing else requires a re-examination of keeping the site active.

[explorador]

Thanks Tangor, I'm seeing this "that did not go well" on my site. It was somehow and I don't know why, a treasure receiving kindness from G, no rules were broken ever, just abandoned site until traffic rules changed. Now after more than one month later, G indexed it but the results behavior are FAR from the original site, and still FAR from any other.

Just launched a new site from scratch with new domain (that's another story) and the results have been good, very diff, so it seems my domain/site is tagged for observation or sandbox.

[explorador]

On 26 July Google SE's started showing (finally) some results on normal searches, I get something happened and the domain was being treated differently, never experienced nothing like this on any of my domains, good to see is finally coming back to normality, hopefully traffic will also come back.

[explorador]

Almost 3 months later from zero, G is finally indexing fast the new content, at least 24 hours after posting. Still no good search traffic juice, I guess still on some sandbox, I figure there are diff ones, for indexing, for search results, for Adsense, etc, quite obvious idea. Will keep working, still no Adsense on this site.