Fixing a blog's performance

I have been running a side project for a number of years, writing content of varying quality and changing permalinks multiple times over.

I have approximately 150 articles.

It has gotten to the point where I have been completely de-ranked after holding top spots for a number of keywords for a number of years.

How my search traffic has reduced:


The lack of experience in my earlier days has left me with nothing but 600+ links on Google that link through to 404s, and backlinks that also 404.

I have no actions manual actions take against me.

What should I do?
Should I migrate my content and start afresh, forgetting my few backlinks?
Should I set up 301 redirects for all my links?
Should I revamp every post, and hope I can regain my previous ranks?

If going in and putting up 301 redirects for all your posts is too time consuming, install a Wordpress plugin that places 301 redirects to your homepage for all your 404 pages and put up the content with the correct permalinks once and for all.

Quality backlinks is what you need. I remember talking to a guy from Malaysia I think. His name was Tom. He worked for citationlabs.com and offered me quality links for cheap. Hope that helps

Why not recreate content for those 404 links instead of 301 redirect?

Links might help in ranking those content.

Eric1979 said:

Quality backlinks is what you need. I remember talking to a guy from Malaysia I think. His name was Tom. He worked for citationlabs.com and offered me quality links for cheap. Hope that helps

Click to expand...

nah

MisterXYZ said:

Why not recreate content for those 404 links instead of 301 redirect?

Links might help in ranking those content.

Click to expand...

Have gone with the auto redirect for time being; there's some good ones out there that intelligently pick the next best article based on slug
Some of the issues I faced were around permalinks; wordpress structure; including old categories .etc

Update no the above; auto redirect is probably leading to poor bounce rate; I've got some pages indexed on Google with a cached title and description that are linking to completely unrelated articles. Nightmare...
Also realised I'd blocked my /wp-content/ folder, and as such, my CSS and JS files. REEEEEE

True Miller said:

I have been running a side project for a number of years, writing content of varying quality and changing permalinks multiple times over.

Click to expand...

Not to be rude, genuinely curious: why would you ever change permalinks, instead of leaving them to marinate for search algorithms?

If you have, in your words, “a few backlinks,” then cutting your losses and starting over may in fact not be a bad idea. You will lose only a little bit, but won’t have to deal with any leftover clutter from your old (well, current) blog. You also won’t have to deal with the bad bounce rate and, who knows, a fresh start may act as a decent motivator to keep pushing on.
It’ll take a fair bit of work, sure, but from what I see, you’re already well used to it.