10,321 Posts - 5,170 pages indexed - 7 visitors yesterday - Blow It Up or Modify?

[DarinH]

I feel like one those sports radio call in people. . .Long time listener, first time caller.

I jumped in feet first with my blog following the "Take Action Now" mantra. I now have a blog with 10,321 Posts, 5,170 pages indexed, and have been getting a pretty consistent 5-10 visitors a day - woo hoo! (I will be buying my own private island in no time with that kind of traffic don't ya think?)

I now see some of the mistakes I made and know some ways to correct them, but my question is would I better off to just blow the whole thing up, delete the database, and start again from scratch or just start doing things better from this point forward?

On the one hand I do have all these pages indexed in google and that's gotta help with something (or does it?). On the other hand, it would feel kinda good to just start fresh, learn from my mistakes, and start over.

[Content Publisher]

10,321 posts but only 7 visitors? Is each post unique, and what would you say the average words per post is?

I might be wrong, but it sounds like your site might have some sort of penalty (only 1/2 of the pages are indexed, and barely no visitors being sent your way). If this is the case, perhaps starting over would be best?

If you can provide more info on the site/content, that'd be useful.

[imMindset]

That's a lot of posts and pages indexed! But if you're only getting 5-10 visitors a day, the very first thing I'd do is install tracking on your site (i.e Google Analytics, or Statcounter). See exactly where those visitors are coming from, and then optimize based on that. So say if you find they are coming from only a few keywords, then see where you rank for those particular keywords and work on getting those ranked higher.

Remember, it's not about quantity of posts. I have some sites with only 30-50 indexed posts, but each of those sites get more than 400 unique visitors per day. That's because I optimized for very specific and high traffic keywords. You need to have a focus with all this. Be very precise, work smart and you'll find yourself getting much better results for much less work.

Also, I wouldn't delete it and start from scratch either. If anything keep the site, and build a new one from scratch. It's very inexpensive to start a new site, and this way you can leverage your previously existing site (s) for the new one and build a mini network. This will be very important if you're competing in more competitive markets.

[DarinH]

In theory, all the posts are unique - I am primarily using articles from Unique Article Wizard. I have just been accepting all of them in my category and realize that was probably a mistake because some of them are just flat awful. I don't know if Google has the technology to penalize you for just being a bad writer!

I am leaning toward just blowing it all up, I'm just concerned what Google will do to my domain when the 5,170 pages it has indexed are no longer there.

[DarinH]

I do have Google Analytics installed, and I have started keying on the keywords and backlinks that are bringing in traffic

[russells]

You should be getting a lot more traffic than that. I know of bloggers getting 1000+ unique visitors per day with as little as 100 unique posts.

Either you've been hit with a penalty (duplicate content?) or your posts have no relevancy or are not targeting specific keywords.

Does each post focus on one or two keywords?

Have you done correct on-page SEO for each post?

I don't know, to be honest, could be a few things but it's certainly not right.

~Russ

[Karen Barr]

Originally Posted by DarinH

In theory, all the posts are unique - I am primarily using articles from Unique Article Wizard. I have just been accepting all of them in my category and realize that was probably a mistake because some of them are just flat awful. I don't know if Google has the technology to penalize you for just being a bad writer!

It's irrelevant what Google thinks of it - if you get a random visitor land on your site and they read one of these nonsensical, spun-to-death articles, do you think they're going to come back, or to recommend your site? No!

I would suggest you winnow through the site and remove all the articles that are grammatically incorrect or don't make sense or simply repeat the same points over and over. That should get rid of about 9000 posts, I'd have thought. Then go through and remove the rest of them that simply mirror information from elsewhere in the site, or that don't fit your exact niche. You'll probably be left with about 100 relevant posts to your actual target niche.

Then, start building relevant, well-SEOd posts with original content - either write them yourself, or hire a writer. 99articles.com is a good place to start with well-written, well-researched articles.

Forget about rankings - you are selling to people, right? If the information on your site is so much garbage, then nobody is going to visit. Get good content first and foremost, then think about improving your rankings.

[DarinH]

Thanks for the tips, and I know that I've made some mistakes on this site.

I am still debating - continue forward doing things better or start over. Karen is thinking along the same lines I was - deleting the bad posts, but it would be a whole lot simpler to just start all over rather than go through 10,321 posts. I'm leaning toward just starting over. It just feels like I have this dead weight on my blog that is not accomplishing anything but does anyone have any thoughts on what Google would think of my domain if suddenly the 5,170 indexed posts are gone? It might not have any affect at all, I don't know.

I am not seeing where can I add a poll to an already existing thread, but I would just like to get an answer to this - start over or leave it and do things better from here out.

[Matt Ward]

I would say with 99.9% certainty that your site has a Google penalty of some sort.

With 10,321 posts, and 50% of them unindexed, those are probably a lot of poorly-spun junk articles that do not identify as unique. And really, 10,000+ posts? Panda was specifically geared toward eliminating "content farms" which a site with 10,000 non-unique posts on random topics could plausibly be identified as.

If I were in your shoes, I would just delete the entire website. Then again, I don't work with autoblogs or anything of that sort. Up to you.

[owenlee]

Im wondering where do you get those post?it is in general or a targeted niche?