The money site I DESTROYED - RECOVERED!

12 replies
  • SEO
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UPDATE: Of course, my site recovered - see later in the thread!

Well, this is a lesson in what NOT to do with a site that's earning money for you. I had a site earning about $200 a month from Adsense but it was done in a little static CMS I wrote, for quick niche site deployment, instead of in Wordpress.

Thought I would migrate it to Wordpress so I could do more with it, and make it easier to sell at some point. Piece of cake, I am pretty tech savvy, hardly a problem for me. Well, here are just a couple of the things I screwed up:

- mistyped a couple of permalinks so they no longer matched those in the Google index (though I could swear I just copy-pasted them, maybe Wordpress screwed something up)
- forgot to copy the meta descriptions across into All In One SEO (important for Google SERPS listing)
- forgot to set decent Title meta tags with All In One SEO
- apparently forgot to UNBLOCK SEARCH ENGINES (Privacy) settings after deploying to a live server (though I could swear I double-checked)!!

Obviously that last one was the biggest problem, since Google has gradually deindexed my site and it no longer ranks for the key terms that were making me money!! I even had some linkbuilding going on all this time, so that's really silly! I wondered why the rankings were getting worse

OK, I am not posting this to whine - I brought it on myself, and it's not like my family is gonna go hungry now.

But because people occasionally ask on the forum whether migrating to Wordpress/changing templates etc. etc. will affect their rankings, I thought it would be interesting to post back on this thread once I see what happens with my rankings. Now I have fixed all the problems, I wonder if the site will just bounce back to its old rankings?

I will keep you posted in a few days or a week or however long it takes for Google to reassess my site And remember, be careful with your money sites kids!
#destroyed #earning #mine #recovers #site
  • Profile picture of the author Mantasmo
    How long has it been since you moved?

    I sell a **** load of sites and let me tell you - despite me insisting to do all the work - buyers often decide to move everything themselves and screw things up. Then I go in, fix everything and the sites bounce back within 2-7 days.

    It'll recover with time.
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  • Profile picture of the author nicktyler
    Looks like you should be ok. You have identified the problems and fixed them sso there is no reason it shouldn't bounce back really.
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    • Profile picture of the author markowe
      Originally Posted by bnetwork View Post

      How long has it been since you moved?

      I sell a **** load of sites and let me tell you - despite me insisting to do all the work - buyers often decide to move everything themselves and screw things up. Then I go in, fix everything and the sites bounce back within 2-7 days.

      It'll recover with time.
      Originally Posted by nicktyler View Post

      Looks like you should be ok. You have identified the problems and fixed them sso there is no reason it shouldn't bounce back really.
      Thanks for the encouragement

      Yeah, I am also fairly confident it will be back - in fact I am deliberately not going to do anything else, apart from 301 redirect the broken links to the correct ones and resubmit the sitemap, and POSSIBLY ping everything just to get the Googlebot back on it a little quicker.

      It will be interesting to see though if Google REALLY ranks my site where it was before. Hopefully it will be even better because I made some changes to the template, moved the ads down a little towards the fold etc. etc. I will report back
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  • Profile picture of the author markowe
    P.S. I moved about ten days ago but only noticed the error/s today! Takes a while to get flushed down the Google toilet!
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    Who says you can't earn money as an eBay affiliate any more? My stats say otherwise

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  • Profile picture of the author markowe
    Oo, here we go, that was quick - some positive results today:

    - one keyword has already recovered its old position, though that's around #35 (got hit by October Panda) - but that was one page where I really screwed up the permalinks, so very pleased with that!
    - the MAIN "EMD" keyword has reappeared at #44 (previously at #2 - #1 pre-October Panda) - EDIT: just realised it's the same above page that's ranking, not the home page. Typical Google Dance type behaviour.

    Obviously that's not exactly stellar, but hopefully things will improve in the next few days. It's tricky that this coincides with a new Panda update so I won't really know what the exact cause was, should I not recover fully.

    But there you go, if you completely hose your site, there MIGHT still be hope!
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    • Profile picture of the author markowe
      Originally Posted by bnetwork View Post

      Told you.
      He, well, we'll see - I need that EMD homepage keyword back at no. 1 or it's still an epic FAIL It's still nowhere to be seen right now (I corrected my initial post above).
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  • Profile picture of the author SEOexperto
    Build few high authority links and youll be back
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    Get ranked in Google Page 1 FAST Quality backlinks
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    • Profile picture of the author markowe
      Originally Posted by SEOexperto View Post

      Build few high authority links and youll be back
      Yeah, I am holding off on that for now, just to see what happens. Of course, I will do some backlinking if it gets stuck.
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  • Profile picture of the author AskJon
    Thanks for bringing in this discussion as I'm sure migrating website cause so many headaches to a lot of people! We'll see how your website recover, but I'm sure you'll get your ranking back! Or at least will do so with minimum quality backlinks, but I'd still wait a few days before getting to any conclusion. 200/month hurt, but we human learn by making mistakes right, so I'm sure your learn yours and will not do it anymore (let's hope so! ) I'm looking forward for the results, so make sure to report back in a couple days and let us know what's happening!
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  • Profile picture of the author markowe
    Just to update you on this - my site homepage, the one that was totally deindexed for a while due to me apparently blocking it to robots and screwing up a couple of things, well it's back at no. 2 for the main money keyword, like nothing ever happened, and seemingly ranking for most of the other secondary kwds too. I expect the earnings to be back pretty much to normal, just as soon as I see the next day's Adsense performance. I am especially pleased that this happened in the middle of this Panda 3.3 update.

    This pretty much confirms what I thought before - if Google has ranked your site, then it's ranked your site, and you shouldn't be afraid to change things about (though the point is NOT to make stupid mistakes like I did!)

    People often ask on the forum, should I change my template, should I rewrite my article a little, will it affect my rankings? I always say, if your ranking is that shaky that it will be affected by a few little changes then you probably need to improve on your basic content and promotion. Small changes are unlikely to negatively affect your rankings, in fact they may well improve them due to creating the impression something is "happening" on your site. Decent rankings should be robust and able to take some punishment .

    Well, case closed pretty much, but I'll let you know if I learn anything else interesting!
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