Sharing an interesting case and a question

Hello guys, this is my first ever post so i will take this chance to thank you all for your usefull information.
So thanks to BlackHatWorld and your inspirational posts, a few years back i took action and managed to make some money which kinda saved my life cause the country that i live had a major economic crysis and i really needed the extra money. So thank you!!

My most succesful progect was a blog, with custom domain on blogspot on which i worked for a month,i wrote about 50 high quality unique articles within this month, started on December 2012 and 3 months later my main keyword was literaly #1 and as you can see my visitors sky rocketed at about 30.000 per month.

No black hat seo, just a few blog comments with backlinks, 1 article directory backlink, and a couple directory backlinks, one facebook page with a couple of shares and thats all.

FYI, as a case study i include a picture of the traffic all those years. Kindly note i never added a single article again after the begining. Stupid? yes. Lazy? perhaps (this was a part time income). You can see how the traffic slowly but steadily declined over all those years which brings me to square one, right where i started i suppose.

Right now my main keywords not only they are not ranking no 1, my site is not even listed when i search for the main keywords. If i search for the site using long keywords then i can find some articles but again not the main home page.

So there is a lesson to be made for all of as, (i cant help but think where i would be if i posted just one article each day all these years). This site made me about 60$ per month with adsense at the begining but after a while i started to directly sell services that the site was about and had the potential to make big money, so i am gratefull.

Now i love this site, back then when i built it, it was my only hope and it saved me. So i would love to bring it back to life. My question is if it is normal that i cant find my site at all on google for my main keywords or if it is a problem with some google updates or keywords overoptimization. When i login to google search control i dont find any manual actions taken from google.

I already started face lifting the site and will start adding new articles, but i am really really looking forward for your thoughts.

Again, i cant describe you enough how gratefull i am for all you people on this site.
Thank you...

I would start on WordPress and use your blogger to link to it. What's your niche?

I would check to see if other people copied your articles since that time, maybe those sites are even outranking you. Even just copy paste like one sentence from some of your articles into Google and see if anything comes up. I am also interested in seeing how Google treats your next article. And my last thing I am interested in, is if other people were building links to your site in the last years. You can search your domain name like "site.blogger.com" into Google and see if you find anything interesting.

There are many possible explanations, but the most likely one is that you didn't keep your blog fresh. Recency is a major ranking factor. I would make a point of adding at least an article per week for the next 3 months and see what happens.

It's also highly probable that you got many competitors since you stopped. I've seen many blogs get to a new niche early, and traffic soars. 12 months later, they have 20 competitors and traffic slumps.

You need to do a content-audit. See which of your pages are still getting traffic and which ones have faded.

Freshen up (lengthen) some of the more faded ones first. Be careful changing anything that's still generating good traffic. Do all the on-page SEO basics ( Make sure your H1, H2 and H3 headers are all in place. Make sure your images are nicely compressed. Etc.)

Then add new posts using supporting keywords and do internal linking.

You'll get there again.

SocialManager said:

I would check to see if other people copied your articles since that time, maybe those sites are even outranking you. Even just copy paste like one sentence from some of your articles into Google and see if anything comes up. I am also interested in seeing how Google treats your next article. And my last thing I am interested in, is if other people were building links to your site in the last years. You can search your domain name like "site.blogger.com" into Google and see if you find anything interesting.

Click to expand...

Thank you all for your interest.
Social manager you are right. Some people have copied some of my articles. But they have used them in general interest sites, so they are not ranking for those keywords.
I am also interested to see how google will treat my next article, although the main issue i want to overcome now is for my main homepage to rank again for my main 2 keywords (as mentioned, the site is nowhere to be found when use these keywords in google search engine and really makes me suspect overoptimazation problem with onsite seo).
In Google tool i see about 1000 backlinks, most of them were built back when the site was ranking No1
Will keep you informed about this project, thank you for your interest, i am open to anny tips - suggestions!

cynicalSEO said:

There are many possible explanations, but the most likely one is that you didn't keep your blog fresh. Recency is a major ranking factor. I would make a point of adding at least an article per week for the next 3 months and see what happens.

It's also highly probable that you got many competitors since you stopped. I've seen many blogs get to a new niche early, and traffic soars. 12 months later, they have 20 competitors and traffic slumps.

You need to do a content-audit. See which of your pages are still getting traffic and which ones have faded.

Freshen up (lengthen) some of the more faded ones first. Be careful changing anything that's still generating good traffic. Do all the on-page SEO basics ( Make sure your H1, H2 and H3 headers are all in place. Make sure your images are nicely compressed. Etc.)

Then add new posts using supporting keywords and do internal linking.

You'll get there again.

Click to expand...

Thank you Cynical for your reply. I also beleive the lack of fresh content also played the biggest role. also i m afraid for keywords overoptimazation and wondering what should i do if this is the case.
I will follow your advice and add fresh content, these days i have plenty of free time, so would it be ok if i add about 2-3 articles per day or i should take it slowly?
Also you are right. Ever since i first made this site, many competitors have shown up, but still, content wise i dont want to sound arrogant but my site easily beats all of them. But not from design perspective and i m already working on it.
Already followed your advice and went through all the posts and made sure everything is in place. Some pages are still ranking, however the big problem is that my main site, the home page, no longer appreas for the 2 main keywords. I mean not at all! not even at the end of the results.
I did a test and just searched on google the first sentence of my homepage and sure enough the main home page an main site appears in top results, i guess that means it is not banned or anything like that.
Thank you for your interest, kindly let me know any more advice that might come in your mind and i will sure keep you p osted about how this goes.
Curiosity and stuborness is also two of the reasons i want to make it happen again!

any more suggestions would be appreciated!

The big question here is -> How were you able to live off of $60?

WIZDAHL said:

The big question here is -> How were you able to live off of $60?

Click to expand...

lol, sorry WIZDAHL, perhaps i was not clear, this money was a side income of my main occupation. I apologize as my English is not so good.

SocialManager said:

I would check to see if other people copied your articles since that time, maybe those sites are even outranking you. Even just copy paste like one sentence from some of your articles into Google and see if anything comes up. I am also interested in seeing how Google treats your next article. And my last thing I am interested in, is if other people were building links to your site in the last years. You can search your domain name like "site.blogger.com" into Google and see if you find anything interesting.

Click to expand...

I have news!!
1. Already after much refreshing the website, even with just 1 new article, my site is again visible in google search engine for my two main keywords. Kindly note i have been working on maintainage of the site already for 2-3 days now. So it did nt happen within one day but still ... so my site appears at the last pages but at least it appears to be alive!


2. After further investigation, you were spot on! One of the websites ranking in the first page for my main keyords, is ranking with one of my articles 100% copied! No mention of my site no links no nothing. The funny part is that he is not a competitor of mine, his services are for the same category but not at all the same, he placed that article there as a filler but as he used copied only my article but also the header of my article , he is now raking page #1 for my main keywords with my article!!

Now guys i really need your advice, how should i go about this? Should i call him and ask him to kindly place a link mentioning my site as a source? Or should i do something elge? Urgently need your advice!! thanks!

Edit
I didnt know That Google can Rank Stolen Content Higher Than The Original
I was curious how he managed to gain so much power from Google. so i did a little search on his backlink profile, and found out he mainly purchases backlinks from web2.0 sites, they appear as articles about his company with backlinks to his site. From curioucity i condacted one of the sites that has his backlinks, to ask how how much it would cost to do something similar with my site and he asked 350 euro for the link to stay for one year!

does anyone have any idea, how much time it would take for the site to bounce back if i add 2 articles per day?