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Serious Suggestions for a Serious Question

by cagliostro
7 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hi guys.

A year and a half ago i started a kinda of experiment. I bought a domain, with two keywords, withing the travel niche.

I installed Wordpress, optimized it a bit, and started to add daily articles. 2-3 per day. The articles are not very good quality and not so original. I'm honest about that.

I did nothing else. No backlinks, nothing. Somebody from my team just posted daily some articles. The last month i added some pictures within the articles.

The result: I get 10 or 20 visits per day, usually from people that want to steal content. Nothing else. Also i see no ranking for any keywords. Just a few long tail ones. Nothing big.

So the question: i will keep this going as my personal project. What should i do next ? Continue to add articles (1000+ so far) ? backlinks ? Add something more to the website ? Or even drop it ?

Thanks
#question #serious #suggestions
  • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
    I would probably drop it. Maybe use it for a link to a new site.

    If all you have done is add 1000 subpar articles about travel, it really does not have much value or much hope for ranking. It could maybe rank for some long-tail keywords if you worked on organizing it and building some things into silos with some good internal linking. Even then, maybe not.

    It sounds like you basically built an article dump.
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    • Profile picture of the author cagliostro
      Originally Posted by MikeFriedman View Post

      I would probably drop it. Maybe use it for a link to a new site.

      If all you have done is add 1000 subpar articles about travel, it really does not have much value or much hope for ranking. It could maybe rank for some long-tail keywords if you worked on organizing it and building some things into silos with some good internal linking. Even then, maybe not.

      It sounds like you basically built an article dump.
      Well, it is very well organized as a website, with categories, tags and visually very attractive.

      I have done ZERO internal linking. But is is easy for me to do so, some Wordpress plugins exist to help with that.

      Thanks
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      • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
        Originally Posted by cagliostro View Post

        Well, it is very well organized as a website, with categories, tags and visually very attractive.

        I have done ZERO internal linking. But is is easy for me to do so, some Wordpress plugins exist to help with that.

        Thanks
        I would not use Wordpress plugins for that. They generally do a horrible job of it. You want intelligent internal linking that makes sense.
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        • Profile picture of the author cagliostro
          Originally Posted by MikeFriedman View Post

          I would not use Wordpress plugins for that. They generally do a horrible job of it. You want intelligent internal linking that makes sense.
          Automation sucks, you are right.

          Please explain what you mean by intelligent internal linking or maybe you could point me to some article or something.

          Thanks
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  • Profile picture of the author SEO-Dave
    You've basically manually created an autoblog and respun some of the content if I'm understanding correctly.

    That's a lot of effort for a crap content site: SEO wise there's no value in a nice looking site or a good navigation structure** without content which Google won't downgrade long term.

    ** That's subjective, since you didn't appear to know what you were doing is still duplicate content and Google downgrades it long term, I bet the navigation structure is poor SEO wise. Have you setup a silo structure to take full advantage of niching your content? Mentioning tags tells me you haven't, WP tags are awful SEO wise and most webmasters tend to add hundreds of tags to a site which is anti-SEO!

    I could run an autoblog off in about 30 minutes with 1,000 respun articles with very good on-site SEO (I develop a WordPress SEO package that works with WPRobot which is the best WP autoblog plugin: hides some of the autoblog footprints), but though it will rank for some long tail SERPs and generate some traffic, it will NEVER rank for competitive SERPs.

    The more you work on backlinks for autoblogs, faster they tend to be downgraded and you need backlinks for hard SERPs.

    I have test autoblogs pretty much identical to what you describe: been looking for over 8 years for ways to avoid the Google downgrade with thin/automated content and so far no joy.

    I can make money from autoblogs, but not a lot, can get an autoblog a few thousand visitors a month (that's not good when talking about thousands of webpages), go much higher (put serious effort into backlinks) and they tend to be penalized badly.

    Autoblogs are not low maintenance due to how little money each one makes. To make serious money from autoblogs you need to create hundreds of sites and as they go down replace them.

    If the site makes money take advantage of it until it doesn't, after that let it expire. If it doesn't make a profit, let it expire as you are wasting your time.

    David
    Signature
    Freelance SEO Consultant
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    • Profile picture of the author cagliostro
      Originally Posted by Stalliontheme View Post

      You've basically manually created an autoblog and respun some of the content if I'm understanding correctly.

      David
      Thanks David for your reply.

      I do know what it is, and i do know that it is exactly what i created. I was clear about it.

      I also use it for my testings for Wordpress, since i do that for a living (installing and maintaining WP).

      So if i could improve it a bit, bring some traffic and monetize it using _maybe_ Adsense, it would be nice for me.

      Some 50% of the articles are duplicate, some 20% is low-quality original and some 30% is modified from other articles. But i could improve that. I could replace slowly that 50% by original of so-so quality. It will cost me nothing, since i have already people working for me for that (for customers).
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  • Profile picture of the author sweezeter
    Low quality articles + no links?

    Just move on and start over, nothing good will come of that. Plus, Panda could give you a nice slap at anytime.
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