Hi webmasters, I've been postponing this thread: I'm guilty of letting some of my websites die, in fact I might have helped such process. You might be surprised by the wrongs I made knowing such things wouldn't help, and now I'm thinking on recovering the websites, but I'm not sure where to begin or how much is broken, by this I mean: the web and search engines are not exactly clear as crystal, one might be sand boxed, penalized, or something else.
Brief: these 2 websites are 100% original, I wrote all the articles and I shot all the pictures myself, for the things I couldn't get a picture, I made the drawings/sketches. There is video production, I shot all the vids and made the video editing. Both websites run on my own CMS wrote specifically to achieve the data structure that I learned via multiple advice here on WebmasterWorld and yes it worked. The sites are FAST and easy on resources. Long story short, via Adsense both provided enough money to buy a house and travel to diff countries, and both opened business opportunities (
just to paint a picture) this is just to give you an idea that the traffic turned into money effectively. NO, I wasn't interested on this at first, both sites were born out of passion entirely, my work and pictures were featured on books, magazines, etc, some for free, and some they bought it from me, and only eventually added Adsense, so... this is not an "I want to make money out of Adsense thread". Yes I own several websites, but this is just about 2.
- Year 2000, website #1 within this context appeared on the web for the first time.
- Year 2010, website #2 also within this context appeared on the web for the first time.
That means 22 // 12 yeas online respectively. Both sites appeared at the top results, great indexing and good traffic IMHO.
What happened? I got bored, lost interest, messed things up, I even thought about selling them but I couldn't dare for several reasons. So, here is the list of my sins:
- 1. Stopped posting,used to do so once every week, or at least twice a month. Then I only posted about twice every 6 months.
- 2. Didn't add SSL,no I didn't care when this became a thing on the web, discussions aside we know this hurts traffic, rankings and visitors, specially when people get an annoying message saying "this site is not secure etc..."
- 3. Changed my CMS, yes my old one worked perfectly, but I decided to create my own framework and build a new CMS on top, it works and I changed everything while keeping the urls and 301 redirections. Yes I knew this sort of changes affect traffic, I cared very little about the effects, this is not exactly a sin but together with the list it does hurt, as you/we shouldn't change too many things at once.
- 4. During the pandemic I stopped posting entirely. Yes... imagine that. Both websites relate to traveling, and I couldn't stand the news explaining how many people complained about "ohhh I can't travel no more, this sucks", so many people suffering! and yes locally I got to hear the same complains, it was disgusting, and probably due to the nature of both sites I was exposed to contact from readers relating to that. I did what I considered to be the right thing: wrote a few articles about how to help other people and stay safe, and stopped posting since then, until Jan 2022 where I started posting again.
- 5. My old hosting provider messed up and I didn't care.Yes, add insult to injury. I finally added SSL to my websites before the pandemic (free, with Let's encrypt), but eventually the hosting provider did something wrong, as some browsers still displayed errors and warnings about the sites not being secure. See, not all certificates are created equal, some work, and some will only work with newer versions of browsers, while showing errors on older versions. Anyway I didn't care and did nothing.
- 6. Removed Adsense entirely. Well that's not a bad thing itself. I also removed every "like" FB button from my websites. Why? I got tired on how these things slow the websites loading, and as I said they are about passion, not money making per se. I removed these about 2 years before the pandemic.
- 7. Stopped sharing on FB. I'm not a social media person, I don't buy it, but eventually opened my first FB account only to share articles I posted on my sites. Yes it attracted some traffic and interactions, IMHO not worth it and yes I got bored dealing with FB friend requests, the ads, etc etc. I stopped posting there about 2 years before the pandemic.
- 8. Oh, remember the GDPR? for years I did nothing. and I didn't care if someday I would get a message or warning about it. I also didn't care when I turned on Adsense again.
- 9. Stopped replying to emails and hide the contact form. I got tired of the nonsense, let me explain: let's say I talked about art around the world, suddenly I got a lot of emails per year asking how to book guided tours around Canada and Spain (?), that's something I never sold and I was never interested on doing, but I know in some way affected interested visitors "no contact form?", and to be honest, some mails were reasonable but I just didn't care.
I turned up Adsense from time to time just to avoid the 6 month bye bye. Anyway, naturally: one day I notice I only have 200-300 daily visitors WOW! that hurt. No, I have never bought traffic, everything has been purely organic... even me messing this up. What also hurts, is finding several websites featuring data and facts that I posted, and yes they link to my website but using url shorteners, for anyone else just stealing I proceeded with DMCA, but I confess, I even stopped doing this.
What I did to try to revert this: I fixed all the technical aspects, SSL and moved to a new hosting company. The search engines picked the new urls (HTTPS) with no issues. Then started posting once a week (sometimes twice), again pure original content with my old research style and efforts. Turned on the ads and noticed I get almost nothing out of it, but it makes sense. And yes, I finally configured the GDPR provided by Adsense.
What's the situation right now? (6 months of posting?) not much of a difference, traffic is still the same, I know it might be too short of a period to expect changes over 6 months. I got emails from people, despite being difficult to find my contact form, but honestly I don't see a real benefit for such hard work creating original content and posting. BESIDES, I get the feeling posting once per month, or once per week has become irrelevant: people expect multiple articles per day, no way I'm doing that, as creating quality content takes hard work.
I know I messed up, lost interest, yes, and it makes sense the traffic went down. But I also suspect or get the feeling, there is some penalty in place, or that both sites were sent to a sandbox.
What do you think? what would you advice me to do? Found a somehow related experience here:
Reviving a Mothballed Site / A 365 days project
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webmasterworld.com...]
But the original poster left the forum, I don't understand why, but anyway that's what happened, and after reading the entire thread I don't see real signs of things actually getting better there, and I don't fully understand the references of sessions per week, <-visitors?.
Each website (of mine) separately right now gets about 5,500 unique visitors per month, and about 13,200 page views per month. That's too low, I used to get in between 750 to 1000 unique visitors per DAY. So there you have it, two threads in one. One interpretation is me asking for help and advice, and the other interpretation is: don't do this at home kids!.
