Update or Start Over?

flogging dead horses

[Dave McClure]

I have a couple of sites that I have done nothing with for about a year, during which time the hit rate has inevitably tailed off. The content and layout etc are OK but will not generate many return visits unless it changes regularly.

So, is it better to refresh and develop these existing sites or to let them die a natural death and develop the ideas in a completely new site (with a different url)? By 'better' I just mean more throughput of visitors - I'm not selling or advertising on these sites.

Thanks :-)

[pleeker]

The existing sites should have a certain amount of inbound links, right? And they should also have been crawled already, even though they may not rank well.

So I'd think you want to keep the existing sites alive, refresh them (as you say), and take advantage of the fact that they already have some links out there on other sites and could/should be found via SEs.

[Dave McClure]

Thanks for that. I suppose I was wondering if there were penalties for inactivity, like being put in a 'sin-bin' as 'not worth re-spidering'