This is something I see far too often:
I have a blog that’s been alive since around 2005. It’s got about 2,500 posts in it and it’s been dying a slow death for years. I don’t know what’s wrong. In the beginning, the blog was ranking very well for all sorts of keywords. I was getting about 1,000 unique visitors per day. Today? I get about 80 visitors a day. I’ve tried adding more content, rearranging the categories, adding tags – all to no avail. I don’t know what’s wrong with the website. How can my site rank well at one point and then stop ranking well now? How is that possible? I have a feeling it’s my fault and that I’m doing something wrong. I’m missing something and I need help. Does anyone have any suggestions for me?
This is my opinion on the subject:
Did you know that operating a “failing (or declining in traffic) blog” is one of the most common reasons for quitting blogging overall? That and lack of success. They’re two different things. A failing blog is one that was once successful, but is now, as you said, dying a slow death. Lack of success is when a blog was never successful in the first place. It’s a shame that people quit blogging so easily because in both of the cases I described above, the problems can be corrected. And corrected quite easily. Before I begin, I’ll give you a quick tip: adding more content isn’t the cure. It’s actually making things worse.
Too Many Blog Posts
I also operate a blog. I’ve been writing on it since 2004 and like yours, it used to get tons of traffic. Up until a short while ago, I thought that times had simply changed and that was why the site’s traffic had slipped. Today, the search engine traffic coming from Google is probably around 10% of what it once was. Since I’ve been busy working on so many other things, I just let it slide. I hadn’t touched it until recently.
A few months ago, I decided to tackle the declining search engine traffic problem. To do this, I needed to look at three things:
1. Quality of posts.
2. Keywords in posts and post titles.
3. Internal linking.
Before I began any work, I checked out how many posts I had on the blog overall. I found that the blog consisted of approximately 1,800 posts in 10 categories. Some categories consisted of 5-10 posts, while other categories had hundreds of posts. One home improvement category contained 65 pages of posts! That’s over 650 posts! Now, ask yourself this question: how is any pagerank supposed to flow to page 65 in a pagination sequence? It’s not and that was one of the biggest problems facing me. Also, as I browsed through some of my older posts from years ago, I found that they were utter junk. Filler, if you will. They had titles like:
A Walk in the Woods
Another Walk in the Woods
Winter Walk
Walk to the Mailbox
Sitting Here Thinking
Driving Up the Road
Titles like that will never be found by way of a search engine. There are no keywords in those titles. The posts may be completely fine, but since the titles were useless, the entire post is useless.
Just a few days ago, I began cleaning house in earnest. Any posts that had nothing to do with anything were deleted. Just by doing that, I reduced the number of posts on the site by about 1,000. As I sit here and type, I have only about 600 +/- left. The reason there were so many of these types of posts was because, when I was writing them, I was writing under the assumption that my posts would always rank well. I mean, they had in the past. Why wouldn’t they in the future? I could basically write anything in the past and it would rank. Also, I was primarily writing for my dedicated audience that would either receive the posts via email or would check the site every few days for new content. I wasn’t exactly thinking about new search engine traffic all the time. So there was that: a lack of quality.
For the remaining posts, I’ll be updating many of their titles. Instead of something like:
Finished the Bathroom
I’ll title the post:
How to Modernize a Small Bathroom
Instead of:
Sitting Here Thinking
I’ll title the post:
Why Do People Sit and Think So Much?
Google doesn’t like statements. It likes questions. People do too. That’s evidenced by the majority of search engine searches consisting of questions. Why am I fat? How do I get rid of this pain in my arm? How can I make my car faster? These are all things people search for. They don’t search for things like: Sitting here thinking.
Poor Internal Linking
This is a biggie. Even if I had 1,800 wonderfully written posts with stellar search engine optimized titles, I bet my blog still wouldn’t rank well in Google. Why? Because there are too many posts. Not too many posts in general, but too many posts for the way I had them linked together, which wasn’t at all. When a great post is located 65 clicks from the homepage, it’s lost in the abyss. It doesn’t matter how good it is. No one is going to find it. Yes, they may have found it back in 2004 when it was close to the homepage (or even linked to directly from the homepage), but as the years pass and as the post sinks deeper and deeper into the quicksand of the website, it stops ranking and gets lost forever. This is what I suspect has happened to the great majority of my posts. Well, that and the majority of them were simply terrible.
Have you ever heard of the importance of internal linking? When it comes to WordPress, it’s all the rage. There are widely available plugins that will help with this task. I do have a related posts plugin installed, but those links located at the bottom of all the posts may be targeting just a few pages on the site. What about all the others? Also, those related posts links link to other pages using the title text. The link text isn’t varied at all and it isn’t contextual, meaning, it’s not located withing the paragraphs of the posts themselves. That’s important. The goal here is to add links that are about installing support beams in a garage right in the paragraph content itself. Do you see what I did there? That’s exactly what I’m talking about. If each and every post I have ever written had multiple links out to other posts as well as multiple links in, I think the blog would be in good shape. I’m actually going to be looking at a plugin called Internal Link Juicer this afternoon. I may install it on my site. It helps automate the process of adding internal links to a blog.
So here’s my advice to you: Go through your website with a fine toothed comb and delete any posts that aren’t worth it. Posts that you wouldn’t feel comfortable emailing to a friend to have them read. Then, once you’re down to a manageable number, begin updating your titles so they’re search engine friendly. When all that’s done, link your pages together like a madman. You should have new posts linking to old ones and vice-versa. After a few months, I think you’ll find your traffic increase once again. But just be sure to avoid writing useless posts in the future. No more:
Website Upgrade – Check it Out!
None of that. No one cares and those types of things will get you in trouble with Google.
Consolidating Similar Posts
Another thing I’m doing is consolidating a lot of very similar posts. I seem to have gotten carried away with myself when I wrote the two dozen “It’s Snowing Outside” articles. I mean, it’s crazy. I also have many posts about installing windows as well as posts about gardening. Last night, I began merging many of these together. I chose what I thought was the most popular one, changed the title and the URL (WordPress will automatically 301 redirect the original URL to the new one), and then began adding the content of the similar posts to that chosen one. The process is very simple. To do it, I copied and pasted the content of each post to the new one and then attached any images to the new post as well. That’s an important step, or else they may get deleted from the system.
There are good reasons for consolidating posts. As I mentioned above, old ones get sucked into the abyss, never to be seen again. They’re on page 34 of the paginated sequence and they receive little to no pagerank. Basically, posts that are old and that haven’t accumulated links through the years will drag the entire website down. It’s better to merge their content with more popular posts, making the consolidated one a super post.
Once I merge the posts together, I’ll need to go through each one with a fine toothed comb to edit any internal links that may have been cut off. So yes, if you’ve got an old blog with tons of posts, you’ll definitely need to prune and merge. That’s just the way it is.
Consolidate your blog posts for more search engine traffic – I just thought I’d throw this out there to see if it helps anyone. I’ve got a blog that’s about 16 years old. It hardly gets any traffic. It used to get tons of traffic back between 2005 and 2008. I’ll admit that I may have screwed things up somewhat along the way because I changed domain names twice, but I honestly think it should be getting more traffic than it is now. I launched the blog in 2004 and initially wrote about home improvement, but as the time passed, I began writing about more and more topics. Today, there are over 1,800 posts and I’m only getting about 100 visitors per day. Back when I was just a few years into the blog, I’d get that number of visitors for just one post. Through the years, I’ve watched as the traffic has slowly fallen. It’s actually quite depressing.
I was just paging through some of the posts on this blog a few moments ago when I realized what I suspect is wrong. While I’ve got tons of posts, many of them were written on the same or very similar topics. Most of these posts would be considered parts of various series. For instance, I’ve got about 100 posts on different garden flowers. I added a few photos of flowers and then added a line or two about each one. As another example, I had written a very long story that was broken up into about 20 parts. I created one post that included the entire story and then 20 more posts that included the parts. And as a final example, I used to take flying lessons and I’d describe each lesson in its own post. Today, there are approximately 50 posts that are only marginally good. In each of these cases, I can consolidate posts into just one for each topic. For example, I can make one “Garden Flowers” post, one “Story” post, and one “Flying” post. All I would need to do is copy and paste the content and photos of the multiple posts into a new one(s) that covers the entire series. That way, the search engines won’t think I’m running a lousy site with a bunch of junk posts. My pages will be thicker with good content. The thin pages will then be deleted. It’ll be sort of like a forum where each series of posts will be treated as a long thread. I think that’s the way to go.
I just took another look at this blog. I noticed another series of posts that can easily be consolidated into one. I did some bushcrafting a while ago and wrote a few different posts on handy knots that I used. In each post, I described a knot. These are fairly short posts that describe the knot and show a few photos. I think it would be beneficial if I were to merge all the posts into one and break that post down into sections. I’ll add the photos to those sections where they make sense. That way, the search engines would appreciate the thick and bulky high quality content, so I’ll get the SEO benefit and the readers will see all of my resources in one place. I think they’d like that as well.
I read up on this a bit and it seems that content consolidation and blog post consolidation is all the rage these days for SEO. People out there claim to have had their search engine traffic double, triple, and then some. I like that idea. I’ve never liked the posts the way they are. So many of them can be removed, but I’ll first see if I can combine them into unique longer posts.
Do you have any experience consolidating your blog posts? If so, how did things turn out? Did you get more traffic? Were you suffering from Google Panda? I think that’s the spell my website is under currently. Having only 100 visitors a day is no way to live.
UPDATE
Okay, I’ve worked a few hours on consolidating some of my blog posts. I have to say that the experience has been rather eye opening. I had no idea how many lousy blog posts I had and I must report that it’s quite a few. Apparently, back in 2008-2012 I wrote a lot of “thoughts.” Stuff that no one in the world would be interested in. If you think about it though, I was doing the right thing. I was using my blog as a “web log.” I was supposed to jot down thoughts about many a different thing. Well, that’s what I did and I somehow ended up with over 1,900 posts, many of which were garbage.
What I’ve done so far is to combine topics into very long posts. So instead of having a category named “Hiking” that contained 35 shorter posts with some decent photos, I now have one post titled something like, “My Hiking Adventures” that includes all the posts merged into one. Yes, it’s a long post, but I think that will be much better than the 35 scattered ones. It’ll be one URL that the search engines might have more respect for.
I’ve done this consolidating with about 150 posts so far. I’ve whittled them down into three. Yes, that’s three posts. And beyond that, I simply deleted about 20 posts about nothing. You know, a short blurb and then an embedded YouTube video. Those have got to be the worst of the worst.
Remember, Google likes long informative posts, so my advice to you is if you have written about learning tennis in the past via many articles, why not merge those multiple articles into one long one? It’ll be easier for people who are interested to read and it may actually earn you some search engine love along the way.
UPDATE
I’ve been working on consolidating my posts for a few days now and am happy to report excellent progress. I’ve reduced the post count by about 200. Boy, as I look at some of these things, there’s no wonder why I’ve been losing traffic. Some of them had absolutely no business being individual posts. They were totally parts of longer posts. For instance, I merged about 20 knot tying posts into one. I merged about 15 porch construction posts into one. About 50 airplane flying posts into one. About 5 crown molding cutting posts into one. And on and on. It’s a real pain because I’ve got to save and then upload all the images, but it’ll be worth it in the long run. So many of these posts have been popular in the past and I’ve had people contact me to see if I had other similar posts. Now, they’ll all be in one place, so I suspect my visitors will like that. And so will Google, I’m sure.
I’ll continue on consolidating every day until I’m finished. Just wait until I get to the flowers. Man, that’s a ridiculous category. About 100 posts that should go into one. Crazy.
I’ve done this in the past. I once had a blog that had many short posts. I had thousands of them. The thing is, they were very helpful. Many of them were “how to” posts that didn’t require a lot of writing to go along with the picture. I decided to merge many of the posts into single posts that were considered more thematic than anything else. My search engine traffic went up a lot after I got rid of all those posts.
There’s an important aspect of large numbers of blog posts that you need to remember as a blogger. Let’s say you have five categories and 500 posts. If you show 10 posts per category page, that’s going to give you 10 pages in a paginated series (if you have 100 posts per category). WordPress only shows a few pagination page links at the bottom of each page, so it may take a few clicks to get to those old posts. That’s not good because with each click there’s a huge reduction in pagerank. This is one of the primary reasons that old posts don’t rank anymore. They’re buried on page 329 and it take 72 clicks to get there. People don’t think of this when writing large volumes of information. If you consolidate your blog posts so there are fewer of them overall, you’ll reduce the numbers, therefore reducing the amount of clicks it’ll take to get to each one. So you’ll end up with nice long posts that have higher pagerank. This should increase the value of your site overall.
You say that you’re only getting about 100 visitors a day now. I’ve had single posts that have gotten 1,000 visitors per day, so don’t worry when it comes to reducing the number of posts you have. Your visitor number should climb once you get things in order.