This is my SOS signal

[telnett]

It all started back in 2012. I struck gold.

I scraped some data and fixed up a simple php based website for adsense coins. It performed way better than anything that I have previously developed.

I did had some basic SEO knowledge so tried to use the best practices. (No external seo, all backlinks were naturally acquired) It turned our great. The site was making up to 300 USD per month.

The traffic plateaued at 10,000 unique visitors per day from all countries and continets. The site is multilingual so that attracts local searchers.

I was happily picking up sweet fruits of a two weeks job for a few years! And then it started.


First hit was major, it happened back in September of 2014. The traffic was still quite ok to keep some adsense income but in January 2017 it took another hit and now is down to 1-1,1k unique visitors per day.

Google is shredding my website and I can't come up with any solution. The only thing that I can think of right now is that 1k unique visitors is enough to spin up a different project using the same site as a starting point.

Any feedback on this unfortunate situation is highly appreciated.

 

[MisterF]

How often do you add new content ?

What off page have you done?

 

[darkziosj]

Dude i would kill for 300 usd a month in my country thats way over the pay for a normal job, i hope you can fix it

 

[telnett]

How often do you add new content ?

What off page have you done?

99% of content came in initially and then only occasional, small additions.

I did nothing outside the website, the traffic just started to flow naturally. To me off-site SEO is the least known forest.

This happened naturally over time:



It had~127,000 pages indexed a year ago. Now down to 55,000. I scraped a lot of content (not articles, the content is actually technical details) so not much text on the site and it basically answers one question for every visitor so not much time on site and mostly bounced visitors. I think these circumstances might signal "low quality content" for google, but I'm not expert here. Looking at the Panguin report is very frustrating as it basically says "this site has to die".

Dude i would kill for 300 usd a month in my country thats way over the pay for a normal job, i hope you can fix it

To me it was nice to have side income, but now I really want to resurrect it. I feel like I'm still in a quite good position with my rankings etc but I just don't have enough knowledge to address the issues.

 

[MisterF]

Have you done a site adit through Ahrefs, as an example to see when / where stuff was getting dropped.

I had a site that lost 450+ links in one day in May this year.

 

[telnett]

I barely use any tools, don't have any paid accounts. So, to answer your question, no I did not audited the site.

 

[seyer]

Did you monitor your competition? Can you identify who overtook your serp rankings and why/how?

Is it correct to assume your niche is evergreen? If so did you at least consider automating updates to the content?

You definitely got a penguin hit and there's nothing you can do about that. Best to restart with a similar project with some tweaks to help you survive a penguin slap.

 

[telnett]

Did you monitor your competition? Can you identify who overtook your serp rankings and why/how?
Is it correct to assume your niche is evergreen? If so did you at least consider automating updates to the content?
You definitely got a penguin hit and there's nothing you can do about that. Best to restart with a similar project with some tweaks to help you survive a penguin slap.

I did not monitored my competition. I suppose that would mean buying monthly subscription for some tool and since I only had one project, taking ~50 USD out of 300 USD income did not looked like a good idea.

My niche is definitely evergreen, the database currently has over 10k records. Adding automated updates is not a problem, the problem is that there is not much content to add any more as the website depends on some product releases.



Ok so I'm taking notes, checking my analytics and I think I'm starting to see a way out of this.

Here is what I have so far:

I can use current project as a proof of concept and build a new one after analyzing analytical data that I currently have collected.
This month I had landing entrances on 7500 pages (out of 22,000 indexed results)

But only 2500 pages had multiple entrances so the rest of 5000 pages only yield 5000 visitors out of 32,000 landing entrances in total. I think I can afford to loose that for the sake of quality and truce with zoo animals.

So that leaves me with a list of 2500 pages to build. I can do it manually this time concentrating on the quality of content. I will definitely start with the best performers (Top 100 brings 13,000 visitors which is roughly half of the remaining traffic).

This plan looks pretty good for me but I still have some fears and reservations.
* I understand that I shouldn't be using the same domain for the new project. My current domain is nicely aged and as you seen have some natural backlinks. External seo isn't my strong suit.
* Using the same server (shared IP) for a similar project might not be a good idea.

 

[seyer]

I did not monitored my competition. I suppose that would mean buying monthly subscription for some tool and since I only had one project, taking ~50 USD out of 300 USD income did not looked like a good idea.

My niche is definitely evergreen, the database currently has over 10k records. Adding automated updates is not a problem, the problem is that there is not much content to add any more as the website depends on some product releases.



Ok so I'm taking notes, checking my analytics and I think I'm starting to see a way out of this.

Here is what I have so far:

I can use current project as a proof of concept and build a new one after analyzing analytical data that I currently have collected.
This month I had landing entrances on 7500 pages (out of 22,000 indexed results)

But only 2500 pages had multiple entrances so the rest of 5000 pages only yield 5000 visitors out of 32,000 landing entrances in total. I think I can afford to loose that for the sake of quality and truce with zoo animals.

So that leaves me with a list of 2500 pages to build. I can do it manually this time concentrating on the quality of content. I will definitely start with the best performers (Top 100 brings 13,000 visitors which is roughly half of the remaining traffic).

This plan looks pretty good for me but I still have some fears and reservations.
* I understand that I shouldn't be using the same domain for the new project. My current domain is nicely aged and as you seen have some natural backlinks. External seo isn't my strong suit.
* Using the same server (shared IP) for a similar project might not be a good idea.

There's the cliche, "knowledge is power". I think you can still fix your site, but only with new and/or updated content. So I suggest the first step for you is trying to figure out who's doing better than you for X keywords and what they're doing better. You don't need paid tools. If you don't know what keywords are bringing you money, plug your site to semrush / majestic / ahrefs -- please google them, you don't need to download or pay for anything. Then validate with your Google analytics (i hope you installed it). That should point you to the right direction of what type of content to produce -- whether it's original or scraped.

Good luck, i'm sure you'll figure this out and come back wiser and better.

 

[telnett]

I have nearly 30 language translations for my text labels so there is very broad network of keywords. One page may rank in #1 pos for PT-BR version at com.br above youtube and yahoo results but the other translations don't do that well.

Edit: In fact, the best PT-BR performer page is removed from English indexing entirely and only had 8 all time views. Other versions are listed, but only 4 languages are pulling in some decent traffic.

EDIT 2: Requested indexing for English version trough the webmaster tools brought the english version back to SERPs right away. I checked it before that and it could not be found for sure and this trick brought it back.