[Journey] Reviving an Abandoned Website

Hey all this is my first journey. I'm using this forum to record progress and keep me accountable as I try to scale a website with very limited traffic.

Niche: Music/Entertainment
Goal: 1000 UV a day

Website Backstory:
I originally built this website around 2 years ago and had no clue what SEO was. It was very different then and had little to no content. I used it mainly to build my programming skills. The original iteration was built using react, golang (for a backend api) and a search database. It was originally deployed on a VM from Google cloud and deployments we're all manual. I would have to set up every docker container myself on the VM and getting updates into production was difficult.

The website is simple in design, it scrapes data from certain websites, transforms that data into a format that I want and stores that data into a database ready to be searched.

It sat for a couple of months before it even got one click from google. Once that occurred I changed the frontend significantly to try and scale the keywords I could capture and improve the UI. By using the custom api, I could generate tons of pages without having to write a bunch of custom content.

After a few months of little work, I started a new job and didn't feel motivated to work on it any longer. I took down the backend and just had the static frontend sitting for a while(basically removing all functionality).

Where Are We Now?
I recently have been looking into growing my income and realized that I may have a perfectly good asset that needs to be cultivated. Also my programming skills tend to improve when I preoccupied with a project like this.

Over the past 2-3 weeks I have done the following:
- Rebuilt the frontend in Next.js(to take advantage of SSR and pre-rendering, still uses a lot of the same react code)
- Rebuilt the backend service, using go again, but simplified and added more maintainable features.
- Deployed the complete project onto my own kubernetes cluster.
- Created CI/CD pipeline from github to my cluster. Basically on push to master branch my code will be built and applied imedietly
- Go the scrapper to work and had to re-scrape all of the data that was lost when I turned off the database(remember to always save an extra copy somewhere!!)
- I have added 3 new pages.

This is the current stats from GSC.


Where Do We Go From Here?
There is quite a lot of work that needs to be done. I will document that work to show what works and what doesn't.

My list:
- Rebrand the website(URL has changed since the website was first started)
- Redesign UI/UX to increase user sickness
- Update website copy and meta tags to improve CTR from SERP
- Add hundreds of new pages(1 per day)
- Introduce a blog and try to capture more keywords/expand the sites scope.
- Purchase/gain backlinks (I want to see if buying/getting backlinks works in this case study)

Following, do you plan on monetizing your website?? If yes. What method??

Your journey seems to be interesting, I follow it.

#777 said:

Following, do you plan on monetizing your website?? If yes. What method??

Click to expand...

I will probably apply for Adsense once it reaches a certain amount of traffic(first got to get it to 1000 U.V.s a month)

Update: 03/20/2021

- I have generated 4 more pages of content. Hopefully they will get indexed, not sure how to follow up once I insert them into the sitemap.
- Met with a UI/UX designer about updating the branding/design of the website. They are on board and will provide me new logos and mockups(that I will need to implement). Over the coming weeks, I will be rolling out new changes to the UI
- Found this guide on getting a few links: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/guides-niche-relevant-links-in-music-entertainment-industry.1150648/ implemented 2 of them. Need to do the rest. Not sure if these will affect ranking due to the parasite nature of them.
- Found vendors for links(on bhw marketplace), interested to see the results.
- Reimplemented google analytics.
- No noteworthy data to show but in future posts will be providing analytics screenshots.

Update 04/03/2022

Things done:
- Generated about 12 new pages. This has slowed down due to a few other issues that needed fixing.

Looks like my updates to my website that I thought would improve my rankings have actually had a negative effect. I've seen a drop in GSC which has been concerning.


I thought by just adding content my rankings would increase but I did not take into account that there were some serious on-page SEO problems that I overlooked.

What Happened?
As explained previously, I changed the front end framework from plain react to next.js. I thought that this simple fix would improve traffic since I was taking advantage of SSG. However, the SEO component that I built was not working properly. A lot of new pages were not getting indexed due to a canonical tag not being provided properly. What I ended up seeing on my browser was the pages that were being generated all at the same tag of "https://mywebsite.com/section/[slug]". Instead of the actual unique ending in the URL just [Slug] was there for everything. This led google to believe that none of these pages were unique.

A fix has been pushed today for that. Still waiting to see how some of the new links will improve the rankings as well as the new branding. For now, this journey is taking longer than had hoped for.