When it comes to deciding whether or not you should attempt to revive and update your old site or if you should just kill it and start over, it is important to understand that both are necessary for longevity in this business. Really it comes down to two key factors that you must take into consideration: time and cost.
Remember, time is money. You must get this concept nailed firmly into your head if you ever want your business and websites to succeed. Always focus time on high-value tasks. With this understood, let’s talk about the time and cost differences between starting new vs. re-building old websites.
Old Site Content
Say you already have a site with 100 pages indexed. You wrote all of the content. In order to find the issues you will have to sit down and preform the Panda Copy/Paste Test on every single paragraph within those 100 pages. This process will take you a minimum of 2 hours if you are already good at preforming the test. Keep in mind, that is a low estimation to only find and document the problems. Nothing is actually being fixed here.
Total = 2 Hours
You will need to add, at the very least, another 2 hours to go back through your documentation, to decide what needs to be done to each article. Whether that is to kill the content, or to re-write the content that is bad.
Total = 4 Hours
After you are done with all of the re-writing and killing, which will most likely take you more than our estimated 4 hours, you will then have to wait another ~100 days for your site to be re-crawled and Google’s databases refreshed. Noticed we said DATABASES plural, not singular. Google dozens of databases and they all have to go through a refresh period.
While Googlebot crawls brand new content first, always, when it comes to re-crawling old content, that task is very low on their list of things to do. Unless you are Amazon, to which Google re-crawls their old content multiple times per day, just in case it has changed in the last hour. What does this leave you? How does ~100 days of your site remaining penalized and sales being very low or stopping altogether sit with you? Not well? Get in line. No one is happy about it, but there is very little you can do unless Google considers your site an authority.
Total = 4 Hours, Waiting 14 Weeks
This means that if you site went from making $1,000 a day to $100 per day, you are losing $90k over the course of that 100 days. Ouch.
Do you see how much time and money is being lost on focusing on the old site so much?
*We didn’t count in the time it takes for you to tell a potential client that everything they wrote is awful and has to be killed or rewritten. They will want it rewritten, and it will take months before they rewrite it. Chances are the rewrites will fail too. It’s just money down the drain.
**Even worse, this assumes you aced your rewrites. It is very common for the rewrites to also fail. That means doing the entire Panda audit again and checking your rewrites. You will probably have to rewrite half of it again. Add another 4 hours, and 14 weeks of waiting to be recrawled.
So in reality it’s 8 hours of boring tests and probably 10 hours re-fixing, and 28 weeks (half a year) of waiting on a 100 page site. Imagine how long a 3,000 page site would take to fix. All the while, losing a ridiculous amount of sales because you aren’t ranking well.
That alone will raise the blood pressure.
Old Site Links
After you have preformed a Panda Copy/Paste test on your content and fixed all of the issues you will have to do a link analysis on your website as well to make sure you aren’t losing juice. This is probably the biggest mistake most SEOs/Webmasters make, is not doing at least quarterly audits to ensure all links are live and the link juice is flowing properly.
Follow our basic link analysis tactics to find any links you want to preserve. These should be links you are proud of. Any type of black hat auto-generated spam can be safely disregarded. Do not redirect article URLs to the homepage or a category page, it simply doesn’t work. You need to rewrite the article or redirect to another relevant article. Dumping all 404s or bad links to the home page will kill your site. Google has this check in place. Always, always, always either rewrite the page, or redirect it to a solid, on-topic subpage. To put it in perspective, you’d be better off doing a redirect to another site than you would pushing to the home page.
Hopefully you don’t have any paid links going to bad articles. It happened to us several times. It is more money down the drain. This is why regular site audits are so valuable.
Compared To…
New Site Content
A new website should have an absolute maximum of 10 pages to begin with. Follow the Hummingbird training on creating the content. Do NOT go by word count, as it just doesn’t matter. It is more about focus and getting the right topics covered on the page for Google to eat and catalog.
Let’s estimate 4 hours to complete these articles (almost a half hour each) and do the basic SEO checks. Target one of them as the main keyword and work on it the most. Focus on how Panda detects substantially similar content in the back of your head for the articles, but seriously, if you follow the Hummingbird training, you should be just fine.
There isn’t a need to “ping” pages anymore. Get some solid links from authority sites and when Google hits those sites it will come to yours to index it. Our testing shows when that happens, the content appears updated in the index faster.
Total – 4 hours, waiting depends on how willing Google is to crawl your host. Probably 4 weeks.
New Site Links
Follow our link building section for specifics on building links. But roughly it takes 30 minutes of work to find and acquire each new link for a new website. Getting 10 solid links at $200 a piece should take about 5 hours total.
Total – 9 hours, new links will be crawled in the same 4 weeks.
The total cost for building a new website from scratch will cost you around $1,500 to $2,000 for links plus 9 hours of work and minor cost for hosting, etc. Be mindful of where you host, as cheap hosts are going down regularly and it is a process we have completely stopped doing. It just isn’t worth it. Focus on solid hosts with a WORKING phone number for support 24/7.
*Also note that you are not losing any money during the waiting period for the site to rank, and if you keep your site small and simple it can rank #1 in less than two months time. We have proven this over and over even in competitive markets.
Summary
Even when we wiped out an old site from 900+ pages indexed to just 2 pages, it took 2 months and is only down to 600 pages indexed. These repairs take forever, and your income won’t notice a difference for a very long time.
The real decision: 18 hours of fixing, 28 weeks of waiting, plus link building time and costs… or 9 hours total + $1500-2000 in link building with rankings in under 2 months?
You can easily build and rank two new sites faster than recovering the penalized one. And let me cover one more thing that is on your brain. Yeah, I know this site is your baby. Your pride and joy. You want to fix it as all the time and effort you put into it. Fuck that. Your focus is to get your revenue back up and it doesn’t matter what you created in the past. Maybe it will come back, but you have to treat it like it isn’t. Too many people in this business, myself included, spend far too much time and money trying to fix the “Golden Child.” Just let it be and start 1-2 new sites. With your new experience, you’ll be able to build the new site better than you did the original.
Trust us.