Reviving a site with bad content?

[DunderMannen]

So... I recently found some new article ideas for my first site ever created. It's earnings have decreased from 300€ in January, to 70€ in April.

It's dropped off a lot in rankings and pretty much all articles that used to be in the top 10 are now on second page, and all articles that used to be top 5 are now in the lower top 10's.

Problem is it has really shitty content on most pages, word counts will go down when I clean it up, and there's A LOT of work to do with those articles. Titles not even updated to 2022 yet for example.

Can I revive it by removing "2020" in some URLs, cleaning up the content and adding new articles? The site has a 10% CVR which is 5x my other sites, I just haven't paid any thought space to it for over a year now and I'm seeing the effects...

 

[Philip J. Fry]

So, this is why you need to focus on one site until you can hire an editor to update the content for you and keep the site up to date in the niche. SEO is not a set it and forget about it game, as your competitors are making content, updating their content, and building links. If you want to set it and forget it, you need to sell and get out, which is what most people on this forum do. Then their business is making sites, taking on the risk of a potentially failed site and loss of capital, and selling it. That's a different business than making business (ie a review publishing company) and running a business.

Anyways, to answer your question, if you do wish to revive this site and focus on it for €300/month, then do so. Otherwise, just focus on one site until you have enough cash flow to hire people to help you with it.

 

[DunderMannen]

So, this is why you need to focus on one site until you can hire an editor to update the content for you and keep the site up to date in the niche. SEO is not a set it and forget about it game, as your competitors are making content, updating their content, and building links. If you want to set it and forget it, you need to sell and get out, which is what most people on this forum do. Then their business is making sites, taking on the risk of a potentially failed site and loss of capital, and selling it. That's a different business than making business (ie a review publishing company) and running a business.

Anyways, to answer your question, if you do wish to revive this site and focus on it for €300/month, then do so. Otherwise, just focus on one site until you have enough cash flow to hire people to help you with it.

I put it up for sale in January planning an exit. Then I only got a handful of offers, so I rejected it and thought I'd improve it and sell later. Well... 5 months later I didnt improve it at all, rankings dropped and now I found new article ideas for it.

I have people helping me but they focus on my big site. Maybe 300€/mo to you isn't much, but to me selling it for €10k is much.

 

[Philip J. Fry]

I put it up for sale in January planning an exit. Then I only got a handful of offers, so I rejected it and thought I'd improve it and sell later. Well... 5 months later I didnt improve it at all, rankings dropped and now I found new article ideas for it.

I have people helping me but they focus on my big site. Maybe 300€/mo to you isn't much, but to me selling it for €10k is much.

If you can do that with your skills you can easily get a remote full time job for a US SEO firm or as an in house SEO that makes $60,000 or more. Then you can use the income to finance a bigger project. No need to bootstrap everything when you can get a ton of cash by just working a job in the meantime. Also it’s guaranteed income and not hypothetical income either.

 

[DunderMannen]

If you can do that with your skills you can easily get a remote full time job for a US SEO firm or as an in house SEO that makes $60,000 or more. Then you can use the income to finance a bigger project. No need to bootstrap everything when you can get a ton of cash by just working a job in the meantime. Also it’s guaranteed income and not hypothetical income either.

In Sweden - wages as an SEO consultant is more like $35k. That's like 2500$/month after tax, not saying it's bad or anything. But building up my fleet of sites to $3k/month, selling them off, and getting $100k sounds a lot better.

I get what you're saying though, and I agree, I probably should get a job LOL

 

[Ryuzaki]

Can I revive it by removing "2020" in some URLs, cleaning up the content and adding new articles?

Probably. Having 2020 in the URLs isn't going to revive it but I'd get that out of there regardless. Having the date in the title tag is fine but I'd never put it in the URL, because every year you'll have to create a 301 redirect to change it. I'd remove the dates, let Wordpress manage the 301 redirects, and update the content.

Things decay because you lose freshness on your articles, and new competitors gain freshness, and they keep growing their topical relevancy, gaining backlinks, and aging while actively publishing more content.

You can for sure regain some, if not all of your past earnings, and grow more, but it's not going to be some quick driveby operation, you know. If it's not going to be extremely serious and be a high priority project, I wouldn't bother. If you have the throughput to treat it like one of your main projects, then by all means, you know.

 

[Philip J. Fry]

In Sweden - wages as an SEO consultant is more like $35k. That's like 2500$/month after tax, not saying it's bad or anything. But building up my fleet of sites to $3k/month, selling them off, and getting $100k sounds a lot better.

I get what you're saying though, and I agree, I probably should get a job LOL

So... you have two choices. Option A is to get a job with a guaranteed income of $2,500 a month and option B is to risk it and have an unguaranteed and hypothetical income of $3,000 a month with an expected windfall of $100,000. If I were you, I'd do A and pursue B part time. If B falls through, you'll still have A. If you go with just A, you might be wasting your time, effort, energy, money and incur a huge opportunity cost. You lose out on $35,000 worth of income for every year you don't work. You're only going to work until 65 or 70. You might as well squeeze as much income out of your working years as possible.

So, yes, go get a job.