Help with a "broken" adsense site

[jasmith]

I recently became the owner of a very 'broken' adsense site. Currently it earns $100 a month and is #5 on the front page of Google for keywords that fetch 14,800 exact searches a month, which I think is great.

The problem is the site is a total mess. The design will be easy to fix up but my concern is content. Currently the site has over 188K pageviews a month and over 40,000 indexed pages BUT it's all unoriginal content. I knew this when I purchased it because I see it as a fixer upper and am willing to put some time/money into getting it sorted out.

Can anyone offer suggestions on what they would personally do?

I thought of 2 scenarios:

1) Get the site completely redesigned and then 'hide' the archived posts from the main site. So the archived/indexed pages that are unoriginal would not be visible from the home page but would continue to get traffic/adsense earnings and then I can produce original content for the main site that's visible.
--> The pros would be less work and cons would be still a total mess and google would still be annoyed at the unoriginality of the site.

2) Hire a writer to go in and rewrite all the posts so they are more original/not copied. Obviously this would be a lot of costly work but in the long run it could improve the rankings since the seller told me his traffic dropped some since his content was unoriginal. It would also help build the site's popularity and I can take it to the next level without 'skeletons' in my closet so to speak.

3) Another idea?

thanks so much warriors.

[jasmith]

any ideas would be much appreciated, i'm totally in over my head.

[IM Ash]

What is the current CPC and CTR for this particular site?

From 188K pageviews you should be making much more than $100, that is unless the site is generating in the region of $0.01 per click.

If it isn't then you should firstly look at optimizing your site to generate a higher CTR.

Google obviously doesn't have anything against the site because it is probably ranking for a whole lot of long tail keywords. If this the case then I wouldn't mess with the content just yet.

If I were you, I would personally look to increase the site's CTR as my first order of business, thereafter I will try and increase my SERP rank for my primary keyword as that will help increase my traffic substantially.

Once the site is earning a decent amount it can begin paying for itself. At this point you can look to spruce up your content (if it is badly written and does not offer value).

[jacobhowardmakesmoney]

There are some great tools out there to help you rewrite articles. Just make them 40 - 70% your own, keep the existing content, and use those tools to help you maintain your status. Some of the ones I use are SEOPressor and Keyword Winner.

[jasmith]

Originally Posted by Eleva8

What is the current CPC and CTR for this particular site?

From 188K pageviews you should be making much more than $100, that is unless the site is generating in the region of $0.01 per click.

If it isn't then you should firstly look at optimizing your site to generate a higher CTR.

Google obviously doesn't have anything against the site because it is probably ranking for a whole lot of long tail keywords. If this the case then I wouldn't mess with the content just yet.

If I were you, I would personally look to increase the site's CTR as my first order of business, thereafter I will try and increase my SERP rank for my primary keyword as that will help increase my traffic substantially.

Once the site is earning a decent amount it can begin paying for itself. At this point you can look to spruce up your content (if it is badly written and does not offer value).

The site is VERY poorly optimized both in adsense but also in design. That's why I wanted it, because as a fixer upper, I knew it could really improve.

It's not that it's poorly written, it's exactly copied from other sites. But I appreciate your suggestion. I'll work on ranking, design and adsense placement first, then worry about content. Makes total sense and I totally thank you

[jasmith]

Thanks for these great suggestions... I definitely didn't want to rewrite the whole thing or pay someone else to do it so this makes better sense.

Originally Posted by jacobhowardmakesmoney

There are some great tools out there to help you rewrite articles. Just make them 40 - 70% your own, keep the existing content, and use those tools to help you maintain your status. Some of the ones I use are SEOPressor and Keyword Winner.

[yukon]

OP, first thing you best do is backup the original site/theme.

I have an ugly azz site that brings in way more $$ with Adsense than my sites with an awesome theme, same content on both sites.

Sometimes ugly gets better CTRs, I don't know why, just that it does.

[jasmith]

@Yukon, thanks so much... I'll be sure to do that (back it up). That's funny, I've heard that a lot but I can't stand ugly sites. LOL. This site is beyond ugly, like 'not working right' ugly and the other problem is with 188K pageviews a month, I think it should be making more than $100 a month in adsense. But definitely will back it up. thx!

[kaedus]

You really need to decide what your goal is. Do you want to make money from the site? Do you want to have a site that looks nice and gets a lot of traffic? You already have content that is getting views, so if your only goal is to make money then you need to test different ad placements and see what is going to get the best clickthrough.

If you are that concerned about the originality of the content, I would optimize the ad placements and invest the money that the site makes into getting new content. That way the site is paying for itself and you are getting the original content you want. You should be able to use the current content for topic ideas, and then once you write an article to replace a copied article, you can create a new page and 301 redirect the old URL to the new one in order to keep the search engine traffic coming in.

[jasmith]

Originally Posted by kaedus

You really need to decide what your goal is. Do you want to make money from the site? Do you want to have a site that looks nice and gets a lot of traffic? You already have content that is getting views, so if your only goal is to make money then you need to test different ad placements and see what is going to get the best clickthrough.

If you are that concerned about the originality of the content, I would optimize the ad placements and invest the money that the site makes into getting new content. That way the site is paying for itself and you are getting the original content you want. You should be able to use the current content for topic ideas, and then once you write an article to replace a copied article, you can create a new page and 301 redirect the old URL to the new one in order to keep the search engine traffic coming in.

WOW! Thank you so much for this killer response. My goal is definitely to improve the monthly earnings since it gets so much traffic... I'd like to see it increased considerably and I can definitely tell the monetization methods need different placements.

But I do like the idea of replacing some stale/stolen content and improving the site's rankings a bit.

Thank you so much! great ideas

[Heidi White]

I have similar question - but my goal is different.

I have a site with too many articles about too many different topics.

Each of the 1000+ articles is a post.

Since the site keyword and domain name are for ONE specific topic - I'd like to keep the 8-10 pages on that topic intact - and do something with the 1000 unrelated posts.

If I do a 301 redirect, however - it's usually to a similar page.

Anotherwords - if someone had a link to an article on Colon Cancer - and my blog is primarily targeted towards Dog Disease & Treatments - does it do me any good to 301 redirect that Colon Cancer link to the home page of the Dog Disease Treatments?

I might continue to get traffic from all those posts - but I assume they won't stick around if the article they are looking for isn't there.