I have a site with 66k+ pages that used to do very well and brought in some nice cash, until one day rankings suddenly dropped and nearly all pages were removed. The domain has got a dmoz listing and quite some backlinks, so I decided to make a few adjustments hoping it would improve, but I gave up after a few months and abandoned the site. Now it's two years later and the 66k+ pages are back in the index. I noticed in the sever logs that over the past two years G kept sending me < 10 visitors/month, mostly trash keywords. If you search for those you would get like 5 results. But the past few months traffic has been going up. Hits from G in August:68, Sept:116, and this month so far 243. I'm trying to figure out what would be the best move to make at this point. Should I start to work on SEO improvements and content generation, or completely remove the poor quality content (66k+ pages) and transform the site into something fresh?
keep the good shit, transform the site into something fresh is what i would do, sometimes it's better to start over, but i'm not expert.
if it was my site I would leave it the way it is for now and see what happens...once there is a little more consistency then I would start messing with on-page, removing bad content, etc. I would, however, continue to add new content on a regular basis. Just what I would do!
I think this is another example supporting the theory that website age lessens penalty amount. It fits the description pretty well with what I have seen. What is shocking is that up until about the Caffeine update it has only taken about 10 months for penalties to roll off. Two years would explain a lot of cases I run into these days. Sucks though... two years is a hard pill to swallow. Thanks given because you got me thinking in tangents. Ted
