Website Traffic

A few weeks ago I noticed a huge spike in traffic on one of my sites after I posted 4 days of consecutive blog post. A few days later Geno Prussakov mentioned something along the same lines. It got me thinking what if I posted a new blog post for 30 consecutive days. What kind of traffic surge would I see? How many new email subscribers would I pick up?

At first I was thinking that I use my book that has 30 topics and is in the never ending hell that is called editing and just break it up and be done but that would be way too lazy. It also doesn't sound like much fun so even though I am sure it will be hard to come up with 30 topics off the top of my head it can be done.

I Want To Hear From You

I want to hear from you! What do you want to know? Every time I go to an Affiliate Summit Meetup here in NYC I get asked all sorts of questions. They range from SEO to email marketing to photography and I never know what the next question is going to be but I look forward to the questions.

I will be showing off some cool pictures along the way. I take way too many pictures that don't get shared enough on the web. What good is taking a picture if no one gets to see it. I am getting more and more into HDR photography and every blog post needs a good picture.

If you look at this picture of the New York subway you will see how the poles jump out at you. I can tell you how this is done. Totally of topic but odds are the 30 days of post will not be connected either as A.D.D seems to creep into my writing from day to day, just enjoy the ride.

The journey starts on Sept 1st! Make sure you are signed up for the newsletter. It will be interesting to see how many people complain about getting a daily email and unsubscribe. It will be a good experiment all the way around. Who knows maybe I will learn something.

Years ago I did an awful thing! I polluted the Internet! Just saying it makes me feel better, now on to the post.

Back in the day I was paying for articles to be written for my sites. These sites were never going to be a main site so I didn't really care if they were going to be penalized. Actually I didn't really care since they brought in a lot of money. One of my sites was my sports site that I started back in 1999 or 2000. The plan went something like this. Do some keyword research and find the best keywords, get a writer to turn out 300 word articles and get them to rank using SEO. Next week find more keywords and do the same thing.

Sounds like a simple plan and these $5 articles made their money back in a week and produced very well until April and May of this year. For ten or eleven years these $5 articles produced better than some of their competition who were trying every trick in the book to out-rank them. While I did go in throughout the years and make these articles a little better it just wasn't a passion and it seemed like work. Work I just didn't have time for.

When the Panda and Penguin penalties starting happening I saw a slight decline but didn't care since this site had produced its share already. In truth it should have been sold off a few years back. It wasn't really on my mind until I started looking at it closer a few weeks ago. I noticed that traffic was on the decline and since it was a Friday night I decided to take a closer look. I thought I would be in Google Analytics for hours when it suddenly hit me to use Raventools instead. First I had to do a little addition to the tools at Raven. I had to add to the report section all the Google changes and add them using the Profile tab.

The Events tool in Raven is one of the most important tools that I use. I use it to see traffic surges and add an event every time a newsletter goes out. For this job I would need to add all the Google updates for the last year, I got them off the SEOMoz site and loaded them into Raven as events. I then went to my Raven dashboard and loaded up my sports site. I produced a little report for last year, then a report for the first six months of the year and then from March until the present day.

My goal was to see what pages were ranking, what pages have lost ranking and what ones are still getting traffic. In my head I was going to get rid of any page that wasn't ranking or getting traffic. The site had 414 pages when I started. I figure I get rid of a hundred pages maybe since some were really outdated. Think my Cleveland Browns page still had Vinny Testaverde as the starter for goodness sake. The meta descriptions were horrible and they were all over stuffed meta keywords. I was standing out to Google as a spam site.

I printed out the reports and put them side by side and in about 5 minutes I knew what I was going to do. Last years report wasn't as good as I thought it was going to be. I had over 75 pages get less than 10 visits each and they all had about an 85% bounce rate. Without regard to navigation on the site I deleted those 75 pages. I thought I was done but in my heart I knew I wasn't even close. I started looking more closely at bounce rates and I had a few dozen pages that were at 70% with 1 visit. These were also gone.

Then I started looking at the dates of the Google changes and I noticed that the Penguin penalty of April 27th was a huge drop in traffic. I started to look at the report from the beginning of the year and I could see exactly what pages were either hit or disappeared from Google.

Many of them were the pages that were just getting about 20 visits a week. This was about 200 pages or so that after April 27th dropped to nothing at all. These were also deleted.

I then ran another report from April 24th until present day and saw that I had a few dozen pages that were getting minimum traffic. I said to myself since Google is looking at the overall quality of the site these pages were going to go also. There is no fancy 301 redirects they are just gone. Goodbye and good riddance. This left me with 14 pages of solid content that I wrote myself somewhere along the line. I find it amazing that the pages I wrote were the ones that did ok. These pages didn't over stuff, and had proper meta descriptions. Even the less used meta keyword tag only had 2 relevant tags in them.

Will the site come back to its former self? That is anyone' guess. Since I am still getting the same traffic to the the same pages I don't really care. I know have a clean website to add to it with some quality when I feel like it. Did these 400 pages affect the overall rankings on the site? I would bet that would be a yes. I know if I was a quality scorer at Google I would have marked this site as spam. It just made no sense to keep these pages.

Some pages were test pages that I had long forgotten about. Some pages were automatically generated using a script pulling in products to affiliate programs that have long since shut down. They were doing nothing but letting the search engines know I was a spam site.

If you know your site was hit by the Google Monster take a look at your analytics and see when your dropped happened by looking at the SEOMoz page. It is a good starting point to find out where your site got penalized. Knowing which update was the killer is 90% of the battle to getting your site back on track. You may not go to the extremes I did with my site but you can get a good idea how to fix your site.

I have been sitting on this post for a while now and didn't want to write it because information changes so fast that by the time I you read this the info it could be outdated. Use this info as a starting point if your website has been taken down into the Google hellhole of rankings. I know a lot of people that have suffered lately because of the Google Panda and Penguin updates, It is really a shame but that goes without saying. A lot of these people are now looking at “How to fix Panda issue” EBooks and spending money they don't have, to get answers that are bland at best. Please don't buy these books, they can't tell you anything you can't find on your own.

Here is my free 2 cents and take it for what it is worth:

After an update happens I try to think like Google and what would they like to see in their results. Not an easy thing but with every update I say to myself what is Google thinking now. I covered this in my Feedfront article last year “Was Panda Just the Beginning“. Of course I had no idea the Penguin update was going to be next and clear out the search results in what Google says is the positive way.

When Panda hit I felt a little sting to one of my sites. I didn't sit there and blame Google for that won't make your rankings go up. I went out and saw what my worst visited pages were for the year and either deleted them or added some content to them. 99% of the time the page was deleted. I then went out and got a few backlinks for some internal pages. Another thing I did was send out 5 days of consecutive newsletters. This put a steady flow of repeat traffic back on to my site. I am sure this was a number that Google was looking at. All of a sudden my visitors went from 80% new to 65% new must have told Google that my site was worthy. Changing a site to get 35% returning visitors is a major feat but can be done. Panda looked at your overall site so by improving in those areas helped get me back to where I was.

[Read more…] about Recovering From Panda and Penguin Updates