The Project
My first website which I launched in 1996 was--as many sites in that era--a static informational content site. First written in plain HTML, later enhanced with SSI and some PHP, I eventually converted it to a WordPress site. During that period the content stayed the same. The outlook changed somewhat with the move from hard-coded HTML to CSS and a responsive layout, but basically the site was in a frozen state for more than twenty years. In WordPress I even wrote my own theme, to mimic the previously hard-coded layout.
During that quarter of a century, it served me well. In the golden era of AdSense it was my flagship site and earned me quite some money. Rankings are still decent, but part of the evergreen content is outdated. The updates of Google in the previous ten years were effective in making a clean distinction between the real quality pages and the fluff pages which ranked good purely based on the internal linking structure, but not because of their individual content quality. But the site still has some pages on page 1 for competitive keywords.
The Goal
I started the endeavor on April 1st. 2021, and reserved a year to revive the site. My goal is to have a 10-fold increase of page-views by April 1st. 2022. An ambitious goal, I know, but the site is established, still has decent traffic and a solid back-link profile.
My plan is to report on the progress here on a weekly basis.
Deleting pages
The first step was to delete part of the content. Yes, that hurts. Some pages on the site are not on-topic, and don't have much interesting content. Other pages have lost their meaning, like a page with "last updates", which linked to updated pages in 2010, the last time I wrote some new content. And a handful of pages were in a foreign language in which I am not proficient enough to write them myself. They were translations of existing pages in English, translated by a translator I hired 15 years ago.
I removed all these pages last weekend. The URLs for the translated pages were 301-ed to their English version, the "last updates" page is 301-ed to the sitemap and the pages with little information were manually redirected to the best matching existing pages.
The page-view graphs dipped somewhat after this cleanup, but now after a week, traffic is back at previous levels. Google still has to remove some of the old URLs from the index, but I can accept that Googlebot is not that active on a site which has been stale for more than a decade.
Writing new content
Some of the evergreen content is still relevant in 2021, but as in almost all niches, interest of searchers has changed. I found a modern topic closely related to the original content of which I have a lot of knowledge and started writing new pages on that new topic. The current pace is about one page per day. These pages are not seen anywhere in the SERPs yet, but I don't care. My main focus in this phase of the project is the quality of the content, rather than the ranking.
E-A-T
15 years ago, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness were mainly determined by the linking structure of sites. Much has changed and the individual content quality of pages is now an important way yo determine E-A-T. Many of the existing pages acquired their back-links naturally because of their high quality, so they fared well through all the Panda updates. But getting natural links to new pages requires more. I recently added a small biography box above all relevant content pages, and am now in the process of rewriting the About section of the site.
In twenty years I have gained a lot of expertise (and authoritativeness I hope :)). Translating that in a concise way in an about section is a challenge and may take another week or so complete.
Ditching AdSense
Yep, I removed almost all AdSense blocks on the site. The reduced revenue doesn't hurt me that much overall. Other sites are currently making much more, and it gives me the freedom to do more experiments with themes and layouts. In 25 years, the top menu and side menu are still in the same place with their menu-items in the same sequence. Part of that rigid layout was dictated by experiments in the past to determine optimal ad placement. Traffic and user-satisfaction are more important in this phase than ad revenue and it is open how the site will be monetized afterwards.
I didn't remove all AdSense code though. Under the new rules, sites need re-assessment by Google if they have been six months without ads. To prevent that from happening, I keep AdSense in some non-intrusive locations. Just to prevent the site to be removed from the accepted site list in AdSense.
What's next
The next week will be mainly used to revamp the about section, and dive in the schema.org documentation to see how I can properly mark all pages and content. I guess I'll write one or two new content pages, but that depends on available time.
