Check your old sites
- SEO |
I haven't been actively doing SEO for a while but due to several people asking me for advice I decided to do some tests to see what was working well.
Turns out a handful of old sites I have (non monetized) are already ranking really well. Luckily I managed to get back into my old analytics account and I can see that since the end quarter of last year their traffic has shot up loads.
All these sites have a few things in common. They are all static html. They are all about 20 pages of content. They have never had any advertisements on them. They have no external links on them and I never did any link building for any of them apart from directing traffic there from my main business that I was advertising.
They are outranking sites that by all conventional knowledge should be kicking me to the dirt.
The sites are basically a collection of articles I wrote that explain some topics in a niche I was in. It's not filler content, I wrote it all to stop having to answer the same questions over and over again.
Looking at the backlinks, there are very few. None show up in google links. There is just a handful of forum threads and blogs where what I wrote is being discussed. And that's it!
One of the sites talks about a product from a big corporate company on an internal page and my site ranks above theirs in the search for that keyword.
It is far to small a sample size to draw any conclusions from but it gives me a few ideas for directions to go in.
Possibilities:
It's got me interested in SEO again anyway. After the majority of my money making sites started losing ranking I stopped link building and let most domains expire.
The thing that fascinates me is that no new content has been added to these sites for at least 7 years.
I am going to port them over to wordpress and start drip feeding a little content when I have the time to write as I still know a lot about the field and there is a lot of new information to add. Will be interesting to see if the new content gets ranked or if there is some sort of "grandfathering" of old content going on. I won't do any promoting at all, just adding content.
I have some other domains still registered with several hundred outsourced articles on them that I used to make money with adsense/amazon/ebay. All were promoted with article spinning link building method and were getting lots of traffic until the method got saturated and google made changes. The all dissapeared out of search engines and I let domains expire but I kept a couple of the larger sites. All of them are still pretty dead, just a few hundred hits a month for obscure keywords. The content on them is rubbish, I paid like $2.50/300 words and just gave lists of keywords. Nothing is helpful just the usual kind of drivel. I am going to add mobile template to those sites and see if that makes any changes also. I can't bring myself to work on them though as the content is so bad I don't want to be associated with it lol.
Anyway, it came as a surprise to me when I saw the traffic so thought I'd post about it.
Anyone else seeing similar things?
Turns out a handful of old sites I have (non monetized) are already ranking really well. Luckily I managed to get back into my old analytics account and I can see that since the end quarter of last year their traffic has shot up loads.
All these sites have a few things in common. They are all static html. They are all about 20 pages of content. They have never had any advertisements on them. They have no external links on them and I never did any link building for any of them apart from directing traffic there from my main business that I was advertising.
They are outranking sites that by all conventional knowledge should be kicking me to the dirt.
The sites are basically a collection of articles I wrote that explain some topics in a niche I was in. It's not filler content, I wrote it all to stop having to answer the same questions over and over again.
Looking at the backlinks, there are very few. None show up in google links. There is just a handful of forum threads and blogs where what I wrote is being discussed. And that's it!
One of the sites talks about a product from a big corporate company on an internal page and my site ranks above theirs in the search for that keyword.
It is far to small a sample size to draw any conclusions from but it gives me a few ideas for directions to go in.
Possibilities:
- All competing sites were doing agressive spammy link building and got penalized (hard to believe as its a very popular niche and not anything IM related)
- The pattern of linking seemed natural and the places that linked to me are given great weight for some reason so I got a boost
- In order to put an end to guest posting google are liking sites more with less external links
It's got me interested in SEO again anyway. After the majority of my money making sites started losing ranking I stopped link building and let most domains expire.
The thing that fascinates me is that no new content has been added to these sites for at least 7 years.
I am going to port them over to wordpress and start drip feeding a little content when I have the time to write as I still know a lot about the field and there is a lot of new information to add. Will be interesting to see if the new content gets ranked or if there is some sort of "grandfathering" of old content going on. I won't do any promoting at all, just adding content.
I have some other domains still registered with several hundred outsourced articles on them that I used to make money with adsense/amazon/ebay. All were promoted with article spinning link building method and were getting lots of traffic until the method got saturated and google made changes. The all dissapeared out of search engines and I let domains expire but I kept a couple of the larger sites. All of them are still pretty dead, just a few hundred hits a month for obscure keywords. The content on them is rubbish, I paid like $2.50/300 words and just gave lists of keywords. Nothing is helpful just the usual kind of drivel. I am going to add mobile template to those sites and see if that makes any changes also. I can't bring myself to work on them though as the content is so bad I don't want to be associated with it lol.
Anyway, it came as a surprise to me when I saw the traffic so thought I'd post about it.
Anyone else seeing similar things?
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Granulr -
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